Hello viperrt10,
BI stand for business intelligence. The big ones are Business Objects,Cognos. There is a host of other products available from very professional to cheap-and dirty.
Personally I work with Business Objects which uses a semantic layer between the front-end (reporting module) and the source (database,flatfile,stored procedure, SQL)
I am a bit biased on this subject, so before I start doing a commercial for my favorite tool I'll try to give some sort of definition of what it does:
Reporting and analysis through graphical interface, presenting user with meaningful labeled objects, ensuring that user can create his own reports without specific knowledge of underlying data-structure or SQL with decent security set up to restrict data-access if needed.
Well, that was a definition "on the fly", but may give you some idea.
Biggest drawback of such nice tools is the initial cost of licenses........... T. Blom
Information analist
Shimano Europe
tbl@shimano-eu.com