Installing and configuring TARGIT BIA

In the Download Center there is a special category call TARGIT BI Accelerators (BIA):

The following screenshots are based on this one:

Running the package will request you to extract the installation files to a proper location on your hard disk, e.g. C:\Downloads\TARGITBIAExtract.

The Accelerator will automatically run once it has been extracted.

Prerequisites of TARGIT BIA can be checked in the Prepare section. In this case we have all software and data required so we click Install and configure BI Accelerator.

It is important that you select the proper product version – in this case the product version of the NAV system. The BIA supports newer and older versions as well in the same package, but proper interpretation of the database is obtained only if you select the right version at this step.

Also, this is where you select the Business Areas (cubes) that you would like to include in your solution. Business Areas are available in the BIA on a license by license basis – so if a Business Area is greyed out, it is because it is not included in your current license.

On the Source tab, you tell the BIA from where to read the source data. For many Microsoft Dynamics solutions, such as NAV and AX, multiple companies may be present within the data. You may, or may not, want to include all companies.

All of the steps so far, will build a comprehensive multidimensional Data Warehouse based on a standard structured Dynamics database. On the Advanced tab, however, you have options to add even more content to your Data Warehouse: New dimensions, new measures, new calculations, new cubes, new external data sources etc.

Whatever you add here will be added to the standard Data Warehouse once you complete the wizard. However, if you make any changes on the Advanced tab it is very wise to save these changes in a project file before proceeding. In this way you will be able reload the project file – with all your customizations – the next you may want to run the Accelerator.

Important notice: The BIA is a deployment tool. I.e. every time you run it, it will delete the old Data Warehouse and create a new Data Warehouse from scratch, based on the input you give it through the BIA Wizard.

Ideally, you only run the BIA once. But in the real World, you would probably run the Accelerator a number of times, tweaking the setup between each run, until you get a satisfying result from it. At that point it is no longer necessary to run the Accelerator – the deployed SSIS packages and scheduled jobs will make sure that your data is updated once every night.