Computing power and storage capacity have been growing exponentially for decades. As capacity has grown and storage costs have plummeted, the amount of data captured and stored by modern businesses has grown apace. One unfortunate result is that modern businesses are now drowning in data. They have so much data stored that it is difficult to separate the critical from the merely important and the important from the
irrelevant.

The limiting factor on making data driven decisions is frequently no longer a lack of data. Rather, it is the inability to quickly and effectively leverage the data to make good business decisions.

This course provides a hands-on introduction to tools and techniques for turning this seemingly limitless supply of data into knowledge and insight that can be leveraged by your business. You will learn tools and techniques for gaining insight into the state of your business and making more effective decisions. Through a series of lectures, hands-on exercises, and lab work we will explore emerging technologies for storing, analyzing, cleansing, and managing large data sets.

Specific topics include:

• Transactional data stores and analytical data stores
• Data warehousing and data marts
• Multi-dimensional data representation and analysis (OLAP)
• Reporting tools
• Data visualization
• Business dashboards
• Organizational and ethical issues surrounding BI system deployment

We will apply these technologies to analyze diverse data from a variety of sources.

The course wiki is available at: http://cmu-bitt.wikispaces.com