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The act of browsing the data using all different combinations of dimensions with the help of an OLAP tool in order to see the corresponding values or measures.

OLAP stands for On Line Analytical Processing. OLAP tools offer the possibility to look at the data in a multi-dimensional way. It gives users the power to analyze data from different angles (dimensions) quickly, as aggregates are often precalculated and stored. Interacting with data through the use of OLAP tools is also known as "slice and dice”.

The process of cleaning up the data before loading them into a data warehouse by removing errors, incomplete information or inconsistency between sources.

Data Integrity stands for the process that guarantees quality, reliability, outcome, trustworthiness, stability and consistency of the data.

Unstructured data are non- structured data (see also "Structured data”). People are using unstructured data every day; examples of unstructured data are emails, webpages, documents, images and spreadsheets.This kind of data does not have a structured format, it has no conceptual or data type definition.

Structured data consists of any data stored in a structured format. That is, in the structured content, there is a conceptual definition and data type definition behind the information.The data has known relationships and predefined data types.This structure can be used by technologies without human intervention and allow us to read, query, analyze and understand the information. Nowadays, 95% of data handled in a BI context are structured.

The main reason why an ODS or Operational Data Store is often build is to give users the possibility to execute operational reports. An ODS can be seen as a (partial) copy of the source system. It typically is also then the source for ETL related activities. The granularity is the same as the source system.

Report bursting is the possibility to deliver a single report to multiple destinations simultaneously. During the refresh of the report you make use of only one simple data fetch and deliver it to the corresponding destinations depending on a changing parameter, often also linked to certain security settings. As an example, a monthly sales report which is send to 50 account managers, who each time only get the sales to their customers in the report they receive.

An ad hoc report is a report created on the fly by sending a query to the database which was not intentionally created and stored as a repeatable, predefined operational report. These reports cover in general a specific need for information that was not foreseen and will be mostly used just once and are thus created "ad hoc” by the BI user.

Data mining or knowledge discovery in a database process (KDD) can be described as the search to discover strategic information and extracting patterns in bigger databases by making use of large datasets. In this process, users are "digging” into the data and make use of artificial intelligence and statistical functions. It helps enterprises and scientists to select the essential information out of massive quantities of data and create prediction models.