SQL Server 2005 is a complete, end-to-end platform for Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, including data warehousing, analytical databases (OLAP), extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL), data mining, and reporting. The tools to design and develop solutions and to manage and operate them are also included.

It can be a daunting task to begin to learn about how to apply the various components to build a particular BI solution, so this chapter provides you with a high-level introduction to the components of the SQL Server 2005 BI platform. Subsequent chapters make use of all these components to show you how to build real-world solutions, and we go into much more detail about each of the technologies along the way.