Microsoft SQL Server's Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Tools

Microsoft SQL Server includes a suite of powerful tools for business intelligence and data warehousing:

The SQL Server database for high performance data storage and retrieval.

Integration Services for extracting, transforming, cleansing, and loading data.

Analysis Services for business intelligence - multidimensional analysis (OLAP) and data mining.

Local cube technology for use of OLAP while disconnected from the network.

Integration Services

Integration Services in SQL Server 2005 provides a development environment for extracting, transforming, and loading data. It has a set of tools that allow you to consolidate your data movement activities in one location, including specialized tools for Business Intelligence data loads.

Integration Services builds on the success of Data Transformation Services in previous versions of SQL Server. Microsoft provides a wizard to help move DTS packages to Integration Services.

Analysis Services

Analysis Services is a product that combines an OLAP server with data mining capabilities. Analysis Services provides a convenient environment for creating multidimensional (OLAP) structures from a relational database.

Local Cubes

Local cubes provide the ability to work with OLAP data while disconnected from an Analysis Server. By giving users specialized subsets of server cube data, you can give users access to more convenient and faster performing cubes.