Business intelligence architecture

A BI architecture has the following components:

• A source system—typically an online transaction processing (OLTP) system, but other systems or files that capture or hold data of interest are also possible

• An extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) process

• A data warehouse—typically an online analytical processing (OLAP) system

• A business intelligence platform such as MicroStrategy

The diagram above illustrates the common setup for standardizing data from source systems and transferring that data into MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy can also access data from text files, Excel files, SAP BI, Hyperion Essbase, Microsoft Analysis Services, and other data sources. For more information on how MicroStrategy can access your data sources, see Data warehouse for data storage and relational design.