Research and consulting firm Gartner defines four common types of analytical technique that organizations commonly use:
1. Descriptive analytics or “What is happening?”. This question is typically answered through the creation of a data warehouse in which historical data is persisted in relational tables for multidimensional modeling and reporting.
2. Diagnostic analytics or “Why is it happening?”. Answer to this may involve exploring information that already exists in a data warehouse, but typically a wider search of your data estate to find more data to support analysis.
3. Predictive analytics or “What is likely to happen in the future based on previous trends and patterns?”
4. Prescriptive analytics, which enables autonomous decision making based on real-time or near real-time analysis of data, using predictive analytics.
Various levels of input is required to address these analytics and cloud tools such as Azure Synapse Analytics provides a platform for the workloads through support for multiple data storage, processing, and analysis technologies in a single, integrated solution.
