If business intelligence (BI) solutions are to deliver vital and accurate information, they need quality, accurate data that is drawn not only from all the right sources, but also integrated to provide a clear picture of the business landscape. That's according to Annemarie Cronje, solution architect of BI specialist SAS Institute South Africa.
"A vital key to turning data into intelligence is integration of the data you have - wherever its location, and whatever its format," she says.
She says SAS is unique in that it offers the industry's first fully integrated solution - one that unites data quality and extraction, transformation and loading (ETL). It's called ETL to the power of Q (ETLQ).
The ETL process consists of all the steps necessary to extract data from different locations regardless of platform or format, transform the raw operational data into high-quality business data, and load it into a data warehouse. SAS provides all of this with the addition of an easy-to-use, metadata-driven warehouse management environment.
"Data extraction is the first and most critical step in creating enterprise intelligence. Because data resides on numerous platforms and servers in a multitude of formats, gaining timely, efficient and complete access to all relevant organisational data is essential,' she says.
The data then has to be prepared or "transformed" for loading into a data warehouse.
"This process is thought to take approximately 80% of the data warehousing effort because it involves many steps, including data quality profiling, cleansing, augmentation and monitoring. If the quality of data is questionable, then business users and decision-makers cannot trust the results."
SAS has a powerful transformation language that handles everything from validation and scrubbing to integration and structuring, including denormalisation and summarisation, to ensure that data in the warehouse conforms to established business rules.
"Most ETL vendors rely on the hope that Structured Query Language (SQL) will give them everything they need for transformation. But SAS goes far beyond that - providing both SQL and more than 11 000 built-in data transformation routines. SAS has the industry's most robust transformation language - a language that compiles on the fly, to assure optimal speed in all transformation activities," says Cronje.
She adds that SAS supports multiple models of client/server computing, providing complete control over how platforms address each other in a mixed hardware and network protocol environment. Information workers can assign data and processing functions across various systems to configure the client/server network that is most efficient for their needs.
"With the numerous options and powerful capabilities for ETL coupled with its interoperability and warehouse management environment, SAS is consolidating its position as the world's leading data warehousing and business intelligence vendor," Cronje concludes.
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SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 40 000 sites - including 96 of the top 100 of the 2003 Fortune Global 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organisations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For nearly three decades, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know.
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