In the current environment, business intelligence and data warehousing are synonymous. Most data warehouse vendors now market their products as business intelligence software rather than data warehouse software. In practice, a data warehouse is an infrastructure component of a popular and widely used system that enables business intelligence.

In general, we use the following broad definition: Business intelligence is a set of methods, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and helpful information for enabling more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decisions. When using this definition, BI must also include data integration, data quality, data warehousing, technical management such as master data, text and content analysis, and many other things that marketing sometimes falls under the information management section.

Therefore, we also view data preparation and data consumption as two separate but closely related parts of the BI architecture stack. We define the BI market narrowly as a set of methods, processes, architectures, and technologies that leverage the output of information management processes for analysis, reporting, performance management, and information delivery.

As this definition suggests, data warehousing is a technology embedded in business intelligence. However, it is important to note that while the data warehouse provides data for business intelligence applications, all BI applications do not rely on the data warehouse to provide the data they need.