A set of extraction processes to populate the application centric warehouse and datamarts is provided in the business intelligence infrastructure. These Extract Transform and Load (ETL) process are needed to move the data from the application to the Staging database. From here, it is moved to the Central Data Warehouse (CDW), and finally is pushed out to the datamarts. Once the datamarts are populated the viewing mechanisms (dashboards, reports etc) can be used to access this data and provide it to business users in graphical or report format.
Staging Area: The Staging ETLs are run and they pull the information through from source through to staging.
Central Data Warehouse: Once staging is populated with data, the Central ETLs are run. These ETLs pull data into the Central Data Warehouse changing data where necessary and applying any business logic required.
Datamarts: This is the final stage of the reporting repository. Data is transformed into dimensional format, and de-normalized to ensure ease of query, and to ensure cube builders/report builders find the data easier to model.
Viewer: The user can then view this data in readable graph like formats (reports, dashboards, cubes) in a number of ways. The application integrates with BIRT which is used to show the embedded charts in the application. Actuate is also supported by the business intelligence infrastructure, which offers additional features over BIRT such as ad-hoc reporting. Or customers would instead use a reporting tool such as Cognos, which takes the data only from the Datamart.