Reports are data presentation tools, and business intelligence BI is a data analysis tool.
The report tool is a type of report making tool and data display tool, which is used to make various data reports and graphic reports. Or make electronic invoices, process sheets, receipts, etc. in a specific format.
The focus of business intelligence lies in the analysis of business data, integrating solutions for data statistics, data display, data analysis and mining. Gartner's definition:
Business intelligence is to extract the data of various operating systems of the enterprise, and then clean, extract, transform and load, that is, the ETL process, and merge it into an enterprise-level data warehouse to obtain a global view of enterprise data. The query and analysis tools, data mining tools, OLAP tools, etc. are used to analyze and process it, and finally the results are presented to the manager to provide support for the manager's decision-making process.
Functionally
Take the report FineReport and the BI tool FineBI as an example.
The application scenarios of FineReport are mainly business report production, such as the statistics, display and analysis of fixed monthly reports, quarterly reports and key data indicators of some enterprises. The main functions are divided into three categories: data display (reports), data query (parameters) and data entry (reporting), as well as report management.
Data display reports can be divided into tables and charts
1. Forms
a. Tree report
b. Aggregated reports
c. Summary report
d. Complex Notes
2. Chart class (generally analyzed by business theme)
Focus on the visualization of business data
3. Data query
a. Data Entry (Fill): Submit information to the database.
Business intelligence tools focus on data analysis, so the difficulty of report production is greatly reduced, but at the cost of not being able to produce complex reports. Different from the traditional way of making a table, his purpose is to quickly build a model of a large amount of data, analyze it in a free dimension, and make a Dashboard. Compared with reports, the focus is on analysis. The advantages are simple operation, large data processing volume, fast analysis, and real-time analysis. It can be combined with data analysis tools such as R and Python to expand the branch of data mining.
Functionally, FineBI has simple reports (summary tables and detailed tables), Dashboard and analysis functions.
Simple report
Dashboard
Data processing includes drilling, linkage, rotation, slicing, and early warning.
From a group perspective
Reports are mainly for IT developers, or report developers specially set up by some enterprises. Because certain database knowledge and a small amount of JS knowledge are required; business intelligence is mainly for business personnel and data analysts. Simple operation, focus on analysis. The final reports and data analysis results of both are shown to leaders and management, who make decisions by analyzing the results.
From the technical structure behind
Business intelligence can be connected with big data platforms to process larger amounts of data. It is often based on data platforms built by enterprises and connected to data warehouses for analysis. Of course, some reporting tools can also complete this part of the work.
In the end, the relationship between the two can be crossed and progressive. The key is to depend on the needs of the enterprise and business needs. It cannot be absolutely judged whether it is good or bad. Each has its own advantages and applicable environments.