Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a term commonly associated with data warehousing.

In fact, many of the tool vendors position their products as business intelligence software rather than data warehousing software.

There are other occasions where the two terms are used interchangeably.

Business intelligence usually refers to the information that is available for the enterprise to make decisions on.

A data warehousing (or data mart) system is the backend, or the infrastructural, component for achieving business intelligence.

Business intelligence also includes the insight gained from doing data mining analysis, as well as unstrctured data (thus the need fo content management systems).

For our purposes here, we will discuss business intelligence in the context of using a data warehouse infrastructure.