1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, February 15, 2021, James Richardson, Kurt Schlegel, Rita Sallam, Austin Kronz, Julian Sun. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. It offers business intelligence tools tailored to various industries (such as financial services, health care, manufacturing and education) and roles (including CEOs, sales, BI professionals.

Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. The applications generally read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a data warehouse or data mart.

History[edit]

Development of business intelligence software[edit]

The first comprehensive business intelligence systems were developed by IBM and Siebel (currently acquired by Oracle) in the period between 1970 and 1990.^[1][2] At the same time, small developer teams were emerging with attractive ideas, and pushing out some of the products companies still use nowadays.^[3]

In 1988, specialists and vendors organized a Multiway Data Analysis Consortium in Rome, where they considered making data management and analytics more efficient, and foremost available to smaller and financially restricted businesses. By 2000, there were many professional reporting systems and analytic programs, some owned by top performing software producers in the United States of America.^[4]

Cloud-hosted business intelligence software[edit]

In the years after 2000, business intelligence software producers became interested in producing universally applicable BI systems which don’t require expensive installation, and could hence be considered by smaller and midmarket businesses which could not afford on premise maintenance. These aspirations emerged in parallel with the cloud hosting trend, which is how most vendors came to develop independent systems with unrestricted access to information.^[5]

From 2006 onwards, the positive effects of cloud-stored information and data management transformed itself to a completely mobile-affectioned one, mostly to the benefit of decentralized and remote teams looking to tweak data or gain full visibility over it out of office. As a response to the large success of fully optimized uni-browser versions, vendors have recently begun releasing mobile-specific product applications for both Android and iOS users.^[6] Cloud-hosted data analytics made it possible for companies to categorize and process large volumes of data, which is how we can currently speak of unlimited visualization, and intelligent decision making.

Types[edit]

The key general categories of business intelligence applications are:

• Reporting and querying software: applications that extract, sort, summarize, and present selected data
• Online analytical processing (OLAP)
• Data warehouse^[7]
• Data cleansing^[8]

Except for spreadsheets, these tools are provided as standalone applications, suites of applications, components of Enterprise resource planning systems, application programming interfaces or as components of software targeted to a specific industry. The tools are sometimes packaged into data warehouse appliances.

Open source free products[edit]

• Apache Hive, hosted by the Apache Software Foundation
• BIRT Project, by the Eclipse Foundation

Open source commercial products[edit]

• JasperReports: reporting, analysis, dashboard
• Palo: OLAP server, worksheet server and ETL server
• Pentaho: reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities
• TACTIC: reporting, management, dashboard, data mining and integration, workflow capabilities

Proprietary free products[edit]

Business Intelligence Tools Definition

Proprietary products[edit]

• GoodData - cloud-based
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Pentaho (now Hitachi Data Systems)
• Qlik
• SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence
• Spotfire (now Tibco)
• Sybase IQ (now SAP IQ)
• Zoho Analytics (as part of the Zoho Office Suite)

References[edit]

1. ^'History of Business Intelligence Software'. business-intelligence.financesonline.com. Retrieved 28 October 2018.
2. ^'A Detailed Look At The History Of Business Intelligence Software'. comparecamp.com. Retrieved 28 October 2018.
3. ^'Integrating Oracle Business Intelligence / Siebel Analytics with Siebel CRM', oracle.com,.
4. ^'Applied Multiway Data Analysis', onlinelibrary.wiley.com,.
5. ^'Cloud BI: 5 Benefits of Cloud Business Intelligence', compudata.com,.
6. ^'Mobile business intelligence brings benefits -- and barriers', searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com,.
7. ^Exploring Data Warehouses and Data Quality Published by Spotless Data Retrieved 15 May, 2017]
8. ^Exploring Data Analysis Published by Spotless Data Retrieved 15 May, 2017]

APPLIES TO: SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure Synapse Analytics Parallel Data Warehouse

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is a modern development tool for building SQL Server relational databases, databases in Azure SQL, Analysis Services (AS) data models, Integration Services (IS) packages, and Reporting Services (RS) reports. With SSDT, you can design and deploy any SQL Server content type with the same ease as you would develop an application in Visual Studio.

SSDT for Visual Studio 2019

Changes in SSDT for Visual Studio 2019

The core SSDT functionality to create database projects has remained integral to Visual Studio.

With Visual Studio 2019, the required functionality to enable Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services projects has moved into the respective Visual Studio (VSIX) extensions only.

Note

There's no SSDT standalone installer for Visual Studio 2019.

Install SSDT with Visual Studio 2019

If Visual Studio 2019 is already installed, you can edit the list of workloads to include SSDT. If you don’t have Visual Studio 2019 installed, then you can download and install Visual Studio 2019 Community.

To modify the installed Visual Studio workloads to include SSDT, use the Visual Studio Installer.

1. Launch the Visual Studio Installer. In the Windows Start menu, you can search for 'installer'.

2. In the installer, select for the edition of Visual Studio that you want to add SSDT to, and then choose Modify.

3. Select SQL Server Data Tools under Data storage and processing in the list of workloads.

For Analysis Services, Integration Services, or Reporting Services projects, you can install the appropriate extensions from within Visual Studio with Extensions > Manage Extensions or from the Marketplace.

SSDT for Visual Studio 2017

Changes in SSDT for Visual Studio 2017

Starting with Visual Studio 2017, the functionality of creating Database Projects has been integrated into the Visual Studio installation. There's no need to install the SSDT standalone installer for the core SSDT experience.

Now to create Analysis Services, Integration Services, or Reporting Services projects, you still need the SSDT standalone installer.

Install SSDT with Visual Studio 2017

To install SSDT during Visual Studio installation, select the Data storage and processing workload, and then select SQL Server Data Tools.

If Visual Studio is already installed, use the Visual Studio Installer to modify the installed workloads to include SSDT.

1. Launch the Visual Studio Installer. In the Windows Start menu, you can search for 'installer'.

2. In the installer, select for the edition of Visual Studio that you want to add SSDT to, and then choose Modify.

3. Select SQL Server Data Tools under Data storage and processing in the list of workloads.

Install Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services tools

To install Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services project support, run the SSDT standalone installer.

The installer lists available Visual Studio instances to add SSDT tools. If Visual Studio isn't already installed, selecting Install a new SQL Server Data Tools instance installs SSDT with a minimal version of Visual Studio, but for the best experience, we recommend using SSDT with the latest version of Visual Studio.

SSDT for VS 2017 (standalone installer)

Important

• Before installing SSDT for Visual Studio 2017 (15.9.7), uninstall Analysis Services Projects and Reporting Services Projects extensions if they are already installed, and close all VS instances.
• Removed the inbox component Power Query Source for SQL Server 2017. Now we have announced Power Query Source for SQL Server 2017 & 2019 as out-of-box component, which can be downloaded here.
• To design packages using Oracle and Teradata connectors and targeting an earlier version of SQL Server prior to SQL 2019, in addition to the Microsoft Oracle Connector for SQL 2019 and Microsoft Teradata Connector for SQL 2019, you need to also install the corresponding version of Microsoft Connector for Oracle and Teradata by Attunity.

Release Notes

For a complete list of changes, see Release notes for SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT).

System requirements

SSDT for Visual Studio 2017 has the same system requirements as Visual Studio.

Available Languages - SSDT for VS 2017

This release of SSDT for VS 2017 can be installed in the following languages:

Considerations and limitations

• You can’t install the community version offline

• To upgrade SSDT, you need to follow the same path used to install SSDT. For example, if you added SSDT using the VSIX extensions, then you must upgrade via the VSIX extensions. If you installed SSDT via a separate install, then you need to upgrade using that method.

Offline install

To install SSDT when you’re not connected to the internet, follow the steps in this section. For more information, see Create a network installation of Visual Studio 2017.

First, complete the following steps while online:

1. Download the SSDT standalone installer.

2. Download vs_sql.exe.

3. While still online, execute one of the following commands to download all the files required for installing offline. Using the --layout option is the key, it downloads the actual files for the offline installation. Replace <filepath> with the actual layouts path to save the files.

   1. For a specific language, pass the locale: vs_sql.exe --layout c:<filepath> --lang en-us (a single language is ~1 GB).
   2. For all languages, omit the --lang argument: vs_sql.exe --layout c:<filepath> (all languages are ~3.9 GB).

After completing the previous steps, the following steps below can be done offline:

1. Run vs_setup.exe --NoWeb to install the VS2017 Shell and SQL Server Data Project.

2. From the layouts folder, run SSDT-Setup-ENU.exe /install and select SSIS/SSRS/SSAS.a. For an unattended installation, run SSDT-Setup-ENU.exe /INSTALLALL[:vsinstances] /passive.

For available options, run SSDT-Setup-ENU.exe /help

Note

If using a full version of Visual Studio 2017, create an offline folder for SSDT only, and run SSDT-Setup-ENU.exe from this newly created folder (don’t add SSDT to another Visual Studio 2017 offline layout). If you add the SSDT layout to an existing Visual Studio offline layout, the necessary runtime (.exe) components are not created there.

Supported SQL versions

DacFx

SSDT for Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 both use DacFx 17.4.1: Download Data-Tier Application Framework (DacFx) 17.4.1.

Previous versions

To download and install SSDT for Visual Studio 2015, or an older version of SSDT, see Previous releases of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT and SSDT-BI).

Business Intelligence Tools Comparison

See Also

Next steps

Power Bi Tools

After installing SSDT, work through these tutorials to learn how to create databases, packages, data models, and reports using SSDT.

Get help