To gain insights from Business Intelligence, you need to easily see and understand what the data tells you by using data visualizations. While these charts and graphs can be eye candy, without proper context they are nothing more than pretty pictures. Data analysts and business analysts may use a variety of techniques to create the reports that they must generate for the business, and can benefit from a database tool that helps to simplify the task and accelerate the process. Join IDERA's Stan Geiger as he explains how to convey the meaning of data effectively and quickly create useful data visualizations for various audiences within your organization.

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Building Effective Data
Visualizations
Stan Geiger

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Stan Geiger
• Director of Product Management, Idera Inc.
• 25 years experience
• Developer
• DBA
• Data Architect
• Business Intelligence Architect
• Speaker at technical events

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“Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven
process for analyzing data and presenting
actionable information to help executives,
managers and other corporate end users make
informed business decisions.”

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What is Business Intelligence?
• Provides historical, current and predictive views of
business operations.
• Help identify, develop and create new strategic business
opportunities.
• Provide businesses with a competitive market advantage
and long-term stability.
• Combines data derived from the market in which a
company operates (external data) with data from
company sources internal to the business such as
financial and operations data (internal data)

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What is Business Analytics?
• Business Analytics uses statistical and quantitative tools for explanatory and
predictive modelling.
• Business Analytics is the subset of BI focusing on statistics, prediction, and
optimization, rather than the reporting functionality

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BI vs Analytics

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Applying Business Intelligence
• Performance metrics and benchmarking
• Analytics quantify processes for a business to arrive at optimal decisions, and
to perform business knowledge discovery.
• Business reporting can use BI data to inform strategy
• Enable data sharing
• Knowledge management

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BI and Data Visualization
• A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
• We are wired for visuals. Half of our brain is dedicated to visual functions
• 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual
• We process images 60,000 times faster than text
• Perception involves subconscious processing of visuals.
• Things like position, color, alignment, size and shape can be processed
subconsciously.

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BI and Data Visualization
• How do I communicate this data in a way
that can be understood by everyone?
• Business leaders need the ability to easily
drill down into the data
• Data visualization brings business
intelligence to life.
• Visualize the data in many different ways

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Data Visualization Example

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Best Practices – Have a Methodology

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Best Practices – Know Your Audience
• Understand who the primary
users are
• What are they interested in?
• Figure out how they would
perceive the data

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Best Practices – Define Resulting Actions
• What actions could the audience take?
• Determine other supporting visualization
• Build drill down capabilities

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Best Practices – Classify Your Dashboard
Classify your dashboards as one of three types:
1. Operational Dashboard – A regularly updated answer to a question or line of inquiry that
frequently monitors operational concerns in response to events or on an ad-hoc basis.
2. Strategic/Executive Dashboard – A high level view of a question or line of inquiry that is
usually answered in a routine, specific way and usually presents KPIs in a minimally
interactive way.
3. Analytical Dashboard – A highly interactive view that provides a variety of investigative
approaches to a specific central topic with a few corollary contextual views.

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Best Practices – Profile Your Data
Classify your data in these three categories:
1. Categorical – Data that logically belongs together, such as: North America, Europe, and Asia.
2. Ordinal – Data that logically belongs together and has a logical sequence: 1st place, 2nd place,
3rd
3. Quantitative – Data that defines “how much” of something there is: $1 million in sales, 20°
Celsius, 150 defects.

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Best Practices – Use Proper Visualizations

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Best Practices – Iterative Design
• Use an Agile approach
• Start with a proof of concept and move on from there
• Gather feedback early and often
• Avoid “analysis paralysis”

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Best Practices - Examples
• Aqua Data Studio
• Database IDE
• Query & Analysis Tool
• Visual Query Builder
• Visual Analytics
• ER Modeler

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Examples

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Examples

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Examples

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Examples

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Examples