Practical Business Intelligence

Ahmed Sherif

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785885433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Processing
• Index: Computer Science

Learn to get the most out of your business data to optimize your business

About This Book

• This book will enable and empower you to break free of the shackles of spreadsheets
• Learn to make informed decisions using the data at hand with this highly practical, comprehensive guide
• This book includes real-world use cases that teach you how analytics can be put to work to optimize your business
• Using a fictional transactional dataset in raw form, you'll work your way up to ultimately creating a fully-functional warehouse and a fleshed-out BI platform

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone who has wrangled with data to try to perform automated data analysis through visualizations for themselves or their customers. This highly-customized guide is for developers who know a bit about analytics but don't know how to make use of it in the field of business intelligence.

What You Will Learn

• Create a BI environment that enables self-service reporting
• Understand SQL and the aggregation of data
• Develop a data model suitable for analytical reporting
• Connect a data warehouse to the analytic reporting tools
• Understand the specific benefits behind visualizations with D3.js, R, Tableau, QlikView, and Python
• Get to know the best practices to develop various reports and applications when using BI tools
• Explore the field of data analysis with all the data we will use for reporting

In Detail

Business Intelligence (BI) is at the crux of revolutionizing enterprise. Everyone wants to minimize losses and maximize profits. Thanks to Big Data and improved methodologies to analyze data, Data Analysts and Data Scientists are increasingly using data to make informed decisions. Just knowing how to analyze data is not enough, you need to start thinking how to use data as a business asset and then perform the right analysis to build an insightful BI solution. Efficient BI strives to achieve the automation of data for ease of reporting and analysis.

Through this book, you will develop the ability to think along the right lines and use more than one tool to perform analysis depending on the needs of your business. We start off by preparing you for data analytics. We then move on to teach you a range of techniques to fetch important information from various databases, which can be used to optimize your business.

The book aims to provide a full end-to-end solution for an environment setup that can help you make informed business decisions and deliver efficient and automated BI solutions to any company.

It is a complete guide for implementing Business intelligence with the help of the most powerful tools like D3.js, R, Tableau, Qlikview and Python that are available on the market.

Style and approach

Packed with real-world examples, this pragmatic guide helps you polish your data and make informed decisions for your business. We cover both business and data analysis perspectives, blending theory and practical hands-on work so that you perceive data as a business asset.

Practical Business Intelligence

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Practical Business Intelligence

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: December 2016

Production reference: 1161216

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78588-543-3

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author Ahmed Sherif	Copy Editors Safis Editing Vikrant Phadkay
Reviewer Davide Moraschi	Project Coordinator Nidhi Joshi
Commissioning Editor Veena Pagare	Proofreader Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Tushar Gupta	Indexer Mariammal Chettiyar
Content Development Editor Aishwarya Pandere	Production Coordinator Arvindkumar Gupta
Technical Editor Vivek Arora

About the Author

Ahmed Sherif has been working in the business intelligence field for over 10 years. He has both an engineering and a business background, which helped him in his first job as a data analyst. Understanding business needs and translating them into technical requirements became second nature. Ahmed started digging into the backend SQL of business intelligence tools such as SAP BusinessObjects, where he started to understand the underlying data model behind the business layout. He used these skills build dashboards and data visualization applications as a consultant for customers who were in need of something more than just spreadsheets.

As a business intelligence consultant, Ahmed has had the opportunity to work with customers from all back end data types. He found a common theme across all of their needs. If the model for the data warehouse is poorly architected on the backend, then it doesn't matter how much technology on the fronted is spent to build a productive business intelligence application. Ahmed has made it his focus to help customers develop useful visualizations from their data.

In 2016 he competed a Masters in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University, where he focused on machine learning and predictive modeling techniques using SAS, R, and Python. As a data scientist, Ahmed strives to fuse predictive capabilities into business intelligence solutions so that organizations can leverage their data to understand the past as well as the future. He is fascinated by anything data visualization related, especially when it involves politics and sports.

You can follow Ahmed on twitter at @TheAhmedSherif.

I would like to thank Kajal, Vivek, Aishwarya, and Davide for all of their editorial feedback to help make this a high quality publication. Also, I would like to thank my colleague Dallas Marks for suggesting me as an author for this very interesting topic. I'd like to thank my father, Dr. SA Sherif, for helping me with my physics homework in the 11th grade. I'd like to thank my brother, Mohammad Sherif, for getting me into sports analytics with fantasy football. I'd like to thank Dr. Saeed and Patricia Khan for being very cool in-laws. Finally, I'd like to thank my beautiful wife, Dr. Ameena Khan, and my two lovely children, Safiya and Hamza, for all of their love and support as I worked long nights and weekends on this book. I would not have been able to do this without you guys!

About the Reviewer

Davide Moraschi is a consultant, writer, and trainer. He's been doing business intelligence projects with technologies such as MicroStrategy, SQL Server, Oracle, and others for more than 15 years now.

Experienced in several sectors including but not limited to healthcare, insurance, and consumer goods, he has been involved in data analysis projects with multinational companies (Microsoft, Novartis, and COTY), international organizations (European Commission and CNR) and non-profit organizations (RES and SevillaUP).

He maintains the website http://moraschi.com/ and can be reached at [email protected].

Since 2012, he has been freelancing with clients in Europe and the US.

Among the many other positions that he has covered during his career, he jokingly adds that he has been the CED (Chief Executive Dishwasher) of his family during more than a decade now.

He is also author of the Packt Publishing book Business Intellig...