[kragen]

does 'bi' mean 'olap'?

because the literal expansion 'business intelligence' (or the explanation in the Wikipedia article) is hard to interpret as something that makes sense in contexts like this where you're apparently talking about features of software rather than social practices. the reference to 'bi cubes' makes me think that maybe it means 'olap'?

[marcosdumay]

It basically means "report editors".

And no, MS ones aren't miles ahead of the competition. But are bundled with Office, so the competition is mostly going out of business by now.

[greggyb]

Except Microsoft's report editor, Power BI, includes a powerful columnstore database that can handle importing and rapidly aggregating 100Ms or even 1Bs of records with query response times of just a couple seconds.

That has been the differentiator. Power BI has lots going for and against it, but its database is miles ahead of competitors' report tools.

Edit: clarification: importing large volumes of data takes more than a few seconds. The query performance of the in-memory database after import is complete is what I referred to above in my original comment.

[systems]

DSS became BI became AI

At some point in time, Decision Support Systems became Business Intelligence and nowadays this is switching ti AI

BI (formerly DSS) is a set of tools that enable Business Analytics , OLAP and technologies that implements OLAP (Cubes and Columnar databases) enables BI

[gigatexal]

I think so but it’s overloaded and basically used for reporting and analysis stuff.

[setr]

bi tooling is usually report/analysis builders, intended to be consumed by.. business users. More importantly, they're usually also meant to be used by business users to build their own reports in the first place -- although in practice it often ends up going back to IT to maintain/update anyways. Basically anything that competes with excel pivot tables is a bi tool.

OLAP/cubes usually underpins bi tooling, since the usecase is almost entirely across-the-board aggregations.