What the hell is BI?
Obviously jargon is a thing, we all deal with it, but when you put something up like this to a more general audience, you’ve got to give some thought to presentation, otherwise you end up with apparent word salad.
We shouldn't have to guess.
Sometimes that data is stored in a variety of places (excel files, a smattering of disconnected databases, sometimes enriching the data with more data pulled from an API...).
Extracting that data to a common location (historically called a data warehouse) tends to be the work of a data pipeline, and the tool used to join, display, filter, dynamically aggregate, and visualize the data has been historically categorized as a "Business Intelligence" tool. Normally these BI tools provide data caching and allow temporary integration of multiple data sources.
The intent is to make it easy for business users to explore, analyze, visualize, share, and present datasets or results.
The biggest examples off the top of my head would be PowerBI, Tableau, and Apache Superset, but "data reporting tool" is a competitive market with many entrants.
(1) optimized for bulk inserts and bulk read operations, not updates or deletes, nor for single row updates
(2) stores data from multiple sources
(3) often a "columnstore" columnar table format is used. This format usually compresses columns in a format that is trivial to decompress (so if a column only contains a handful of similar flags, the database will run-length-encode them to optimize a full column scan), and additionally if you limit the number of columns accessed you can substantially reduce the cost of the query
(4) the data warehouse can easily shard or partition data
If you want to technical file format examples, I suggest looking up how the Parquet file format compresses data, or how Microsoft SQL Server columnstore tables work under-the-hood.
> Sounds like essentially consolidating data in a database and visualizing it
Yes, and the database in which you consolidate the data is called a "data warehouse" In many cases the sources of data are ... not optimal for querying. (And I mean like "Spread across a dozen excel spreadsheets that people e-mail out new versions of when they make a change" by "not optimal")