Course Outline
Business Intelligence, also referred to as BI - is the collective term for technologies and software applications which are used to gather, provide access to, and analyse data and information about operations throughout the enterprise.
Business Intelligence systems allow companies to understand factors affecting their business, such sales metrics, production, internal operations, which can help organisations make well-informed business decisions.
Course Content
This Business Intelligence training course has been written to cover all the main aspects of designing and building data warehouses and cubes using SQL Server 2008, Analysis Services and Integration Services, and how to make best use of the reporting functionality of Reporting Services.
Available as a public or closed course at our London training centre, delivered on-site as a bespoke, customised training course.
This course has been developed for real-world, commercial scenarios by our expert instructors. See below for detailed syllabus.
What you will learn
- A thorough understanding of the need for data warehouses and OLAP.
- A practical understanding of how to build star schemas and cubes in Analysis Services.
- Practical skills in the use of Integration Services to transform data into star schemas and cubes.
- Use Reporting Services to display cubes.
- Manually design reports in Reporting Services, and get the most out of the automated wizards.
- Report against both relational and OLAP databases.
- Deploy and administer reports
- Set up report subscriptions and control report security.
Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2008 Training Course Outline
SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services (2 days, Monday/Tuesday)
Overview
Reporting Services (SSRS)
Report Server
Report Designer
Report Builder 3
Report Manager
SharePoint Report Center
Designing reports – fundamentals
Report Wizard
Report Designer
Report Builder 3
Tablixes (tables and matrixes)
SQL relational reports
MDX cube reports
DMX data mining reports
Using report templates and report parts
Previewing reports
Deploying reports to Report Manager and SharePoint
Designing reports – further techniques
Formatting (including dates and currency)
Using expressions
Conditional formatting (and green-band reporting)
KPIs for SSRS 2008/2005
KPIs for SSRS 2008 R2 (and data bars)
Grouping and drill-down
Totals and running totals
Sorting
Charts and guages
Parameterised SQL reports
Parameterised MDX reports
Multiple reports
Drill-down, drill-through, and drill-across
Subreports
Jump reports
Linked reports
Alternative visualisation
Exporting reports to Excel and PDF
Report Viewer and creating a customised intranet site
Reports on PowerPivot
PowerPivot on reports
Exporting reports to PowerPivot and Excel pivot tables
Exporting reports to a data feed
Reports in PerformancePoint
Administration
Configuration Manager
Report Manager
SharePoint integration
Caching reports
Report snapshots
Report subscriptions (emailing reports)
Security
SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services (2 days, Wednesday/Thursday)
Overview
Business Intelligence overview
Analysis Services (SSAS)
Review of third normal form and relational OLTP databases
Introduction to relational star schemas
Introduction to multidimensional cubes
Building dimension tables
Building fact tables
Building cubes in BIDS
Building cubes in PowerPivot
Developing an Integration Services ETL package
Dimension design
Attribute hierarchies
User hierarchies and drill-down
Attribute relationships
Key collections
Snowflaked and parent-child dimensions
Cube design
Calculations and named sets (using MDX expressions)
KPIs (using MDX)
Actions (drill-through and reporting)
Partitions and aggregation design
Perspectives
Data mining
Clustering
Forecasting
Basket analysis
Decision trees
Data mining from Excel
Graphical DMX prediction queries
Visualisation
MDX queries
DMX queries
SSRS reports on cubes and data mining
Excel pivot tables
PowerPivot with DAX
PerformancePoint scorecards, analytic reports, and dashboards
Administration
Backing up and restoring star schemas
Backing up and restoring cubes and data mining
Slowly-changing dimensions
Incremental updates
Security
SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services (1 day, Friday)
Overview
Integration services (SSIS)
Workflow
Control Flow toolbox overview
Data Flow toolbox (ETL) overview
Control Flow
Package variables
Script Task
Execute SQL Task
Send Mail Task
WMI Event Watcher Task
Analysis Services tasks (with XMLA)
Sequence Container
Foreach Loop Container
Data Flow
Sources, destinations, and transformations
Data Viewers
Conditional Split transformation
Derived Column transformation
Lookup transformation (with caching, Sort and Merge transformations)
Fuzzy Grouping transformation
Administration
Deploying packages
Executing packages with dtexec and stored procedures
Scheduling packages with SQL Server Agent
Configuring packages
Logging packages
Security
