Database Reference
In-Depth Information
F I g u R e 13-1
Self-service BI lifecycles
As with everything in life, the best approach is often a middle-ground: allow-
ing a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) to do the large part of
combining data and then opening the door to business departments to use the
centralized data sources, but also to expand and integrate their own sources.
THE PLACE oF PoWErPIVoT
A common misconception is that PowerPivot is a visualization tool. Aside
from the ever-present table visualization, PowerPivot is not a visualization
tool in the slightest—no graphs or charts are part of the toolset. Instead,
PowerPivot is a data modeling and data integration tool aimed at a business
user. Incorporating Microsoft's xVelocity engine, an in-memory column-store
analytic database at its heart, and a new functional language called DAX (for
Data Analysis Expressions). Where PowerPivot sits is as a bridge between users
and IT. Business users can create their own analyses, combining data from the
corporate data warehouse as well as their own formulae and possibly external
data sources. They can start sharing these analyses with their team by publish-
ing to a collaboration portal built in SharePoint and using PowerPivot services
to do the calculations. The final step in an enterprise BI scenario is when the
business has decided that this analytic workbook is business-critical—which
decision is often driven by usage metrics on the workbook in questions—and
IT is asked to take it over. At this point, the workbook is imported into Analysis
Services using Visual Studio, optimized using such techniques as partitioning,
role-based security suiting the data within the workbook, and then deployed
