BI + SQL Glossary
As I started writing posts for this blog I realised that as IT professionals we’re quite used to talking in acronyms and using obscure technical terms (and even technical slang), this can be quite off-putting for anyone new to the field so I thought I’d put together a glossary for the blog.
| BI | Business Intelligence, a method or process used to help a business extract maximum benefit from data being stored and collected across the organisation. |
| BIDS | Business Intelligence Development Studio, an IDE bundled with Microsoft SQL Server 2005+2008 to aid development of SSIS and SSAS tasks. |
| Data Mart | A centralised store within a company, usually relating to specific department, product or business area. Data Marts are usually grouped up into Data Warehouses and may be part of the same project/process. |
| Data Warehouse | A centralised store of a company's data in a conformed structure that standardises data across the business and makes it possible to report and measure performance from all areas of the organisation. |
| DDL | Data Definition Language, the parts of SQL used to build and maintain data structures, incl. CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, DROP COLUMN, etc. |
| DML | Data Manipulation Language, the parts of SQL used to SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE data. |
| DW (or DWH) | A short-form of Data Warehouse. |
| ELT | Extract, Load and Transform, essentially the same as ETL but with slight philosophical differences. |
| ETL | Extract, Transformation and Load, whilst the term refers to the process of importing data into a data warehouse the term equally refers to the class of software used to perform that task. |
| Extent | A 64kb storage unit representing 8 contiguous 8kb pages in SQL Server. |
| GUI | Graphical User Interface, any part of software that uses graphics as opposed to a command-line interpreter. |
| IDE | Integrated Development Environment, a GUI designed to simplify programming and development tasks easier. |
| OBIEE | Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (formerly Siebel Analytics), now Oracle's flagship BI product. |
| ODI | Oracle Data Integrator, an ETL tool aimed at the enterprise market, formerly Sunopsis. |
| OLAP | On-Line Analytical Processing, a method of analysing data by structuring it in multiple dimensions as opposed to standard 2-dimensional (row/column) tables. |
| OWB | Oracle Warehouse Builder, an ETL tool for the mid-market. |
| Page | An 8kb block of data, the smallest unit of data that SQL Server uses to store data. |
| RDBMS | Relational Database Management System, a software system designed to manage data stored in a series of tables that can be joined to one-another in order to create efficient processing and retrieval. |
| SQL | Structured Query Language, the most common computer language used to access relational database. |
| SSAS | SQL Server Analysis Services, Microsoft's OLAP tool used for multidimensional analysis. |
| SSIS | SQL Server Integration Services, Microsoft's ETL tool provided with SQL Server 2005 and 2008. |
| SSMS | SQL Server Management Studio, Microsoft's SQL IDE provided with SQL Server 2005 and 2008. |
| SSRS | SQL Server Reporting Services, Microsoft's reporting/BI offering. |
| VM | Virtual Machine, an 'image' of a PC that runs in a virtualised environment (i.e. a PC within a PC). |
| VPC | Virtual PC, Microsoft's virtualisation offering, commonly used in place of the more generic term 'VM'. |