It is best practice for Business Intelligence projects that reporting and analysis should never be performed against complex operational/transactional systems.  Operational systems are designed and tuned for quick update and retrieval during business activites, for example Order Management and Sales Invoicing, whilst reporting applications require historic and aggregated data views.

Data Mart Design

Business Intelligence systems are designed to allow users to report on and analyse the business with ease and speed in a way that is intuitive for them.  This is best achieved by providing access to relevant data mapped to the business in the form of a reporting data mart.

Comset's consultants have considerable experience of designing and implementing data marts to support complex reporting and analytical requirements.  The dimensional modelling design technique that we use seeks to present the data in a standard, intuitive framework that allows for high-performance query access.  A dimensional data structure is readily understood by query tools and is extensible to accommodate new data elements as the business itself evolves.

Moving Data Into the Data Mart - More...