SQL Server Kilimanjaro and Project Madison

This week the BI Conference has kicked off with an announcement!  There will be a BI focused release of SQL Server code named Kilimanjaro which is expected H1 2010 with CTPs available within the next 12 months.  Kilimanjaro is focused on "People Ready BI".  
A key component of Kilimanjaro is "Project Gemini", this is all about self-service BI using Excel.  The vision behind Gemini is to free IT resources by giving business intelligence analysis and reporting capabilities to the end-users without IT losing control.

Is this where Microsoft finally fill the gap left when they shoe-horned some parts of Proclarity in to PPS, leaving themselves without a great stand-alone OLAP client tool? Let’s hope so… I am a little uncertain as to the direction that they are taking BI in. As a once frustrated end-user, I can see how the masses of information workers will love the capabilities. I can also see that this may well lead to a huge increase in unstructured an potentially conflicting information if not managed very carefully.

At the same Microsoft will be releasing "Project Madison", this is the integration of Datallegro which will offer you an easy scale out solution to support data warehouses of up to 100s of terabytes.

All in all very exciting news and I will keep you up-to-date whenever I learn more. I am certainly hoping for more information on the management of the data, how this fits with the overall DW framework, and mysterious lack of information to date on PerformancePoint2…

Although SQL Server 2008 was “launched” last February at a marketing event that also featured Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, this week Microsoft finally released its database software to manufacturing.

SQL Server 2008 is available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will also be available for evaluation downloads. Pricing for the database will be the same as the previous version, SQL Server 2005.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx Has Ent, Dev, Std, Web and Workgroup for subscriber downloads, can’t see Express or Ent Trial yet on the non subscriber pages.

Also Eval Edition and Feature Pack are now available

If you need some help installing, see this SQL School Video

On general release for around a week now, which suggests that RTM is not far away

• Download SQL Server 2008 here
• Download the updated feature pack here
• Download updated sample databases here 

Given that we have both Business Objects and the Microsoft BI stack, (well actually we have a bit of pretty much everything at my new place!!), I have recently been working on various evaluation papers in order to make some recommendations in terms of standardising our BI/DW platform(s) going forward.

One of the articles I came across was this comparison paper from Symmetry Corporation , this is from the introduction….

Choosing a Business Intelligence (“BI”) offering is an important decision for an enterprise, one that will have a significant impact throughout the enterprise. The choice of a BI offering will affect people up and down the chain of command (senior management, analysts, and line managers) and across functional areas (sales, finance, and operations). It will affect business users, application developers, and IT professionals. Before deciding on a BI offering, business decision makers must evaluate a company’s BI offering with respect to what it has to offer each of these stakeholders. This paper will analyze the key considerations for deciding on a BI offering, review the BI strategies of Microsoft and Business Objects, and then evaluate each company’s offerings in light of these key considerations.

As Symmetry are a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner for BI and a longstanding member of the Microsoft BI Partner Advisory Council, no prizes for guessing that they come down in favour of the Microsoft stack. However, the article in itself has some useful information that potential BI adopters may find useful

You can download a pdf of the article here

This looks interesting …. see the link here 

Panorama Pivot Table for Google Docs is an interactive table that automatically extracts, organizes, and summarizes your data. You can use this report to analyze the data, make comparisons, detect patterns and relationships, and discover trends. In just a few steps any users can find answers such as the best selling region, and best selling product or analyze results of an academic research. With Panorama Pivot Tables for Google Spreadsheets, you can interact with the data and look at it in various ways in a simple drag and drop environment.

The Pivot Table for Google Docs is developed by Panorama, who were, interestingly enough, the original inventors of Microsoft Analysis Services OLAP (Online Analytic Processing) engine. So now, part of Panorama code will be inside two of the biggest software companies in the world!

With this new feature, every Google spreadsheet user will have access to powerful OLAP, as a free BI SaaS add-on to Google Docs. In my opinion - a very wise move by Google to continue to push Google Docs into enterprises.

In order to compete with Excel, among many other features, Google spreadsheets lacked specific business functionality needed to analyze vast amounts of data stored in these spreadsheets. With Panorama free add-on Google spreadsheets, users can now take advantage of this lightweight - but still very respectable and powerful - OLAP engine. Yes, out of the box native pivot tables in spreadsheets can do basic analysis on rows and columns of data, but Panorama takes it much farther with more powerful OLAP functions like (I don’t actually know yet what subset of full Panorama OLAP functionality is available as Google add-on):

• Drill up/down
• Drill across / Drill through / Drill anywhere
• Allocations
• Combine/merge/split dimensions
• Exception handling and conditional formatting

Dan has blogged a nice little walk-through of his installation experience with the final CTP of SQL Server 2008. 

Dan English’s BI Blog: SQL Server 2008 Feb CTP6 Installation Experience

The final CTP for SQL Server 2008 (aka Katmai) has recently been released.

This release is mooted to have the full functionality of the final RTM version.

You can get it here