This blog post will explore the importance of metadata in designing a Business Intelligence (BI) project, and how BI4Dynamics leverages it to automate data warehousing
Firstly, let’s define metadata. It refers to the additional information and descriptions of data. For instance, when taking a picture using an iPhone, the metadata information includes the geolocation and time the picture was taken. In a BI project, metadata encompasses all the details of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system in Dynamics, such as tables, columns, primary keys, option fields, enums, and table relations.
The relevance of metadata
Metadata is crucial in designing BI projects since it enables fast solution development. By having all the essential data information, it’s easy to create a data warehouse quickly and efficiently.
How BI4Dynamics uses metadata
BI4Dynamics application provides access to Dynamics data and essential metadata. For instance, there are 10,885 tables in this version of Microsoft Dynamics, and detailed information on specific tables such as CustTable with 206 columns (formatting and column count is also available – including enum).
Now, every table must have a primary key to be covered in the modelling. The information about the table relation is extremely important for the modelling. For example, in the SALESLINE table, the ITEMID column connects to the primary key with the same name in INVENTTABLE. Understanding the relationships between different tables and columns is critical in modelling data.
Just imagine how helpful this could be when you are developing a model that you are not familiar with. Helping you with this is extremely important. See this in action in our youtube video.
Conclusion
Now you can see how powerful the usage of metadata modelling is because the modelling is much faster and more accurate. You don’t want to do it manually anymore
