What does it mean when a business intelligence solution has a 3-tier architecture?
Initially, business intelligence applications were 2-tier technology architecture based composed of desktop clients and servers. The move toward web-based architectures has resulted in 3-tier architectures composed of multiple information delivery clients – win32 desktops, thin browser, fat browser, multiple mid-tier servers focused on specific functions – content, analysis, mail, web, etc. and a data tier composed of multiple database servers.