What is business intelligence?

You hear quite a bit associated with this term Oracle BI or Business Intelligence, in general. And term business intelligence, from a layman’s standpoint, is really nothing more than taking some type of user interface application that you have and using that tool in order to be able to ask questions of data that you have stored somewhere. And that somewhere, where you have data stored, could be in a data warehouse, but it could also be in a transactional data source or it could be in a file of information; it really does not matter. But the answers that you get back from those questions that you ask the data source are going to determine some of the real-time business decisions associated with how you are going to operate your business going forward.

And so, some of the examples associated with what you could actually query on are listed here. So, for example, show me the sales for each district by month or show me the lowest-ranked salesperson by region. And the reason that you are asking these questions is because you intend to do something with answer, and based on the answer that you are going to get back will determine your course of action going forward on how you will actually use this data, and use it to affect whatever the decisions are that you are going to make within your operation.