Free ebookBusiness Intelligence Foundations: Concepts, Roles, and Common Architectures

Course Description

Business Intelligence Foundations: Concepts, Roles, and Common Architectures is a practical ebook course in Information Technology that helps you understand how modern organizations turn data into reliable decision support. If you are exploring Data Science and Business Intelligence, this course clarifies what BI delivers, how it is used across teams, and why the right foundations matter before building dashboards and reporting.

You will learn the core BI vocabulary used in real projects, including how facts, dimensions, measures, and grain shape trustworthy analytics. The course explains the difference between OLTP and OLAP systems so you can recognize why operational databases are optimized for transactions while analytics platforms are designed for fast queries and consistent metrics. You will also follow the journey from raw data to BI-ready data, connecting the roles of data warehouses, data marts, and the semantic layer that makes business-friendly reporting possible.

To help you work effectively in a BI program, the ebook breaks down common BI team roles and handoffs across analyst, analytics engineer, and data engineer responsibilities. You will understand common BI architectures, from small business setups to modern cloud stacks, and how choices in modeling and tooling affect performance, cost, and maintainability. Data modeling concepts such as star schemas, conformed dimensions, and join behavior are introduced in a way that supports practical analytics work and reduces confusion when building or reviewing models.

Reliable Business Intelligence depends on more than visuals, so you will also learn how governance, access control, and metric consistency protect trusted reporting at scale. The course covers reliability and quality practices including testing, data validation, and monitoring, helping you spot issues early and build confidence in the numbers. Finally, you will connect technical foundations to outcomes by learning how requirements translate into dashboards, reporting, and decision workflows that stakeholders actually use.

Start this course today and build the BI foundations you need to communicate clearly, collaborate across data roles, and deliver analytics that drive better decisions.