Glossary of technical terms

    A
  • Application Programming Interface; a set of functions made available to interact and integrate with a software application or system.
  • B
  • Represents the quantity of data read, transformed and loaded into a destination at one time
  • C
  • This is the physical storage for the entire table. To reduce fragmentation of the column segments and improve performance, the columnstore index might store some data temporarily into a clustered index called a deltastore and a btree list of IDs for deleted rows. The deltastore operations are handled behind the scenes. To return the correct query results, the clustered columnstore index combines query results from both the columnstore and the deltastore.
  • Clustered indexes sort and store the data rows in the table or view based on their key values. These are the columns included in the index definition. When a table has a clustered index, the table is called a clustered table. Data rows are stored in sorted order.
  • Columnstore indexes are the standard for storing and querying large data warehousing fact tables. This index uses column-based data storage and query processing to achieve gains up to 10 times the query performance in your data warehouse over traditional row-oriented storage.
  • A sequence of characters that specifies information about a data source and how to connect to it
  • When a server is taking too long to reply to a data request made from another device
  • A multidimensional structure containing aggregated and calculated data that can be viewed in different ways (through slices) for a better understanding of the collected data
  • D
  • An angle through which the Measures are analyzed
  • E
  • Extract, Transform and Load; processes by which you can perform tasks within a database; Extract (read) consists of collecting data from one or more sources; Transform consists of converting extracted data into the correct format through tables to be processed in the data warehouse; Load (store) consists of writing the converted data into the destination database.
  • I
  • Contains information about its associated Data Model and can be used to execute scripts using given parameters
  • M
  • A numeric field whose values can be measured, e.g., Sales Total, Costs, Margins, Quantities, etc.
  • N
  • The Non Clustered index contains a copy of part or all of the rows and columns in the underlying table. The index is defined as one or more columns of the table and has an optional condition that filters the rows.
  • Non-clustered indexes have a structure separate from the data rows. A non-clustered index contains the non-clustered index key values and each key value entry has a pointer to the data row that contains the key value. Data rows are stored in an unordered structure called a heap. The pointer from an index row in a non-clustered index to a data row is called a row locator. The structure of the row locator depends on whether the data pages are stored in a heap or a clustered table. For a heap, a row locator is a pointer to the row. For a clustered table, the row locator is the clustered index key.
  • S
  • A subsection of data within the Cube; defined by a set of Dimension elements
  • T
  • Key that identifies the field used in the incremental load
  • U
  • Uniform Resource Identifier; a string (sequence) of characters that unambiguously identifies a particular resource.
  • V
  • Presents data in different formats that are easy to read, such as Worksheets and many types of Graphs.
  • W
  • Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. Using WCF, you can send data as asynchronous messages from one service endpoint to another. The messages can be as simple as a single character or word sent as XML, or as complex as a stream of binary data. SEI uses WCF services for the BI Service, BI Job Service and BI Distribution Service.