Business Intelligence and NAV

There are a lot of Business Intelligence tools out there and they can be used in combination with Dynamics NAV. Many of the BI tools out there are based upon the BI data model or the multi-dimensional data model.

In fact there is a big difference between the OLTP data model and the OLAP data model. Online transactional processing (OLTP) is typically what an ERP application like Dynamics NAV is all about. The OLTP data model is made so that the same data is not stored in multiple tables. The OLTP data model is a normalized data model. Some OLTP applications normalize more than others. Dynamics NAV is an example of an application that has a complex data model. For example the name of a customer or description of an item is stored in the Customer and Item table, but when you create an order (purchase, sale, production, return, and so on) the description is copied over to the document line table. When you post the document, the name or description is copied over...