Business Intelligence

Business intelligence refers to the technologies, practices, and strategies for collecting, integrating, and analyzing business data to support informed decision-making. BI tools transform raw data from multiple sources into actionable insights through interactive dashboards, automated reports, and data visualizations that make patterns and trends visible to non-technical stakeholders.

Common BI platforms include Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and Metabase. These tools connect to databases, data warehouses, and APIs to pull data, then provide drag-and-drop interfaces for building visualizations and reports. Modern BI stacks often include a data warehouse like Snowflake or BigQuery where data from various systems is consolidated before analysis.

For web development, BI intersects with analytics implementation and data pipeline design. Web applications generate valuable data through user interactions, transactions, and feature usage that feeds into BI systems. Developers are often responsible for implementing event tracking, building data export APIs, and creating embedded analytics dashboards within applications. Understanding how BI tools consume data helps developers design schemas that produce useful insights.