Big Data, Data Warehouses, and Business Intelligence Systems - Database Processing: Fundamentals, Design, and Implementation - page 536

both primary business transactions (item sales) and supporting transactions
(shipping, tracking, and financial transactions) truly requires Amazon.com to
handle Big Data.
The need to deal with larger and larger datasets has grown over time.
We will look at some of the components of this growth. We will start with
the need for business analysts to have large datasets available for analysis
by business intelligence (BI) applications and briefly look at BI systems,
particularly Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), and the data warehouse
structures that were designed for their use. We will then look at distributed
databases, clustered servers, and finally the evolving NoSQL systems.

Business Intelligence Systems

Business intelligence (BI) systems are information systems that assist managers and other
professionals in the analysis of current and past activities and in the prediction of future
events. Unlike transaction processing systems, they do not support operational activities, such
as the recording and processing of orders. Instead, BI systems are used to support manage-
ment assessment, analysis, planning, control, and, ultimately, decision making.

The Relationship Between Operational and BI Systems

Figure 12-2 summarizes the relationship between operational and business intelligence
systems. Operational systems —such as sales, purchasing, and inventory control systems—
support primary business activities. They use a DBMS to both read data from and store
data in the operational database. They are also known as transactional systems or online
transaction processing (OLTP) systems because they record the ongoing stream of business
transactions.
Instead of supporting the primary business activities, BI systems support management's
analysis and decision-making activities. BI systems obtain data from three possible sources.
First, they read and process data existing in the operational database—they use the operational
DBMS to obtain such data, but they do not insert, modify, or delete operational data. Second,

Figure 12-2
Relationship Between
Operational and BI Systems

Operational
Applications

Operational
DBMS

Operational
Database

(Order Entry,
Manufacturing,
Purchasing,
Inventory,
Etc.)

Functional
Users

Extract of
Operational
Database

Reporting Data Mining

BI
DBMS

Business Intelligence Applications

Management
& Management
Support Users

Purchased
Data