Using sentinel technology in the TARGIT BI suite

This paper demonstrates so-called sentinels in the TARGIT BI Suite. Sentinels are a novel type of rules that can warn a user if one or more measure changes in a multi-dimensional data cube are expected to cause a change to another measure critical to the user. We present the concept of sentinels, and we explain how sentinels represent stronger and more specific rules than sequential patterns and correlation techniques. In addition, we present the algorithm, implementation, and data warehouse setup that are prerequisites for our demo. In the demo we present a dialogue where users, without any prior technical knowledge, are able to select a critical measure, a number of cubes, and a time dimension, and subsequently mine and schedule sentinels for early warnings.