Learn how to transition from Excel-based business intelligence (BI) analysis to enterprise stacks of open-source BI tools. Select and implement the best free and freemium open-source BI tools for your company's needs and design, implement, and integrate BI automation across the full stack using agile methodologies. Business Intelligence Tools for Small Companies provides hands-on demonstrations of open-source tools suitable for the BI requirements of small businesses. The authors draw on their deep experience as BI consultants, developers, and administrators to guide you through the extract-transform-load/data warehousing (ETL/DWH) sequence of extracting data from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) database freely available on the Internet, transforming the data, manipulating them, and loading them into a relational database. The authors demonstrate how to extract, report, and dashboard key performance indicators (KPIs) in a visually appealing format from the relational database management system (RDBMS). They model the selection and implementation of free and freemium tools such as Pentaho Data Integrator and Talend for ELT, Oracle XE and MySQL/MariaDB for RDBMS, and Qliksense, Power BI, and MicroStrategy Desktop for reporting. This richly illustrated guide models the deployment of a small company BI stack on an inexpensive cloud platform such as AWS. What You'll Learn You will learn how to manage, integrate, and automate the processes of BI by selecting and implementing tools to: Implement and manage the business intelligence/data warehousing (BI/DWH) infrastructure Extract data from any enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool Process and integrate BI data using open-source extract-transform-load (ETL) tools Query, report, and analyze BI data using open-source visualization and dashboard tools Use a MOLAP tool to define next year's budget, integrating real data with target scenarios Deploy BI solutions and big data experiments inexpensively on cloud platforms Who This Book Is For Engineers, DBAs, analysts, consultants, and managers at small companies with limited resources but whose BI requirements have outgrown the limitations of Excel spreadsheets; personnel in mid-sized companies with established BI systems who are exploring technological updates and more cost-efficient solutions

Bridge the big data gap with Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts The distinction between departmental reporting done by business analysts with Excel and the enterprise reporting done by IT departments with SQL Server and SharePoint tools is more blurry now than ever before. With the introduction of robust new features like PowerPivot and Power View, it is essential for business analysts to get up to speed with big data tools that in the past have been reserved for IT professionals. Written by a team of Business Intelligence experts, Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts introduces business analysts to the rich toolset and reporting capabilities that can be leveraged to more effectively source and incorporate large datasets in their analytics while saving them time and simplifying the reporting process. Walks you step-by-step through important BI tools like PowerPivot, SQL Server, and SharePoint and shows you how to move data back and forth between these tools and Excel Shows you how to leverage relational databases, slice data into various views to gain different visibility perspectives, create eye-catching visualizations and dashboards, automate SQL Server data retrieval and integration, and publish dashboards and reports to the web Details how you can use SQL Server's built-in functions to analyze large amounts of data, Excel pivot tables to access and report OLAP data, and PowerPivot to create powerful reporting mechanisms You'll get on top of the Microsoft BI stack and all it can do to enhance Excel data analysis with this one-of-a-kind guide written for Excel analysts just like you.