Are you interested in working for Microsoft? Do you live in Europe (or have a permit to work in Europe)? Well Microsoft Europe just made a site just for you:
http://www.joinmicrosofteurope.com/
Now I've check the "work environment" and "meet the team" and it all sounds very good. I say - go for it!
Well apparently, you can miss out on a lot of things during a two weeks vacation. Luckily I came back in time to see SP3 Beta for SQL Server 2005 get released! But I'll talk about that in a bit...
The announcement of Project Gemini in SQL Server 2010 sparked a very heated debate in the BI Community, over how much it might be abused by users as an alternative to an organized DW \ OLAP solution. The discussion did not go unnoticed by Microsoft. I guess I can only sum up by saying that we'll see what happens in 2 years time...
The end of the summit where Project Gemini was announced, there was yet another display for how Microsoft sees the future of BI - this time with a demo done on Surface.
Meanwhile, for SQL server 2008 things continue as usual. Cumulative Update 1 was released in the beginning of the month, enabling us, amongst other things, to render reports to PDF in specific fonts. I guess releasing CU 1 for SQL Server 2008 also took enough weight off the shoulders for Microsoft, because they have committed to releasing SP3 for SQL Server 2005 by the end of the year. In the meanwhile - there is a beta release for SP3. It is expected to include all of the Cumulative Updates up until and including CU 9. So this means that you should also check out the release of Cumulative Update 10 for SQL Server 2005, (making the grounds also for CU 11, so I guess all as normal).
The really BIG news for SQL Server 2008? The RTM of the Feature Pack! This includes, amongst other things, the Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007 and the beloved Report Builder 2.0. Report Builder 2.0 still isn't a click once application so I guess there is more we can expect to come.
Does all of this mean I should be happy to take just a two week vacation and not something longer?...
The Microsoft BI Conference 2008 has been the source for quite a few announcements. First of all, now that DATAllegro was purchased by Microsoft, the talk is about SQL Server handling bigger amounts of data. There have been posts not just about terabyte projects, but also petabyte projects. The full integration of DATAllegro's technology into SQL Server is planned for the first half of calendar year 2010 and is code named Project Madison. SQL Server 2010 itself is code named Project Kilimanjaro.
The real surprise? Project Gemini which sounds like Microsoft giving QlickView a run for its money... but I'm ahead of myself. Project Gemini is the code name for Analysis Services using column-oriented and in-memory technologies running inside Excel. This means faster access for all applications working against cubes stored in this brand new way. Microsoft is hoping to empower the end - users even more, as now they will be able to build models by themselves.
I think this is marvelous news and a brilliant move on the part of Microsoft (not that you would expect anything less...). First of all, I saw a presentation of QlickView a while ago. QlickView offers instant, in memory, manipulation of massive datasets. The demo I saw was very impressive. Thing is, for the good and the bad of it, QlickView works against tables rather than cubes and I don't know how much that may limit your capabilities at defining calculations (I would have to stress I haven't tried and can only assume). But in any case, QlickView looks very impressive visually and the response time we saw was excellent, which is also the reason why its share in the BI market is growing rapidly. The QlickView representative who came to give us the presentation said he believes in memory storage is the future and I guess now I see just how right he was... Microsoft has taken QlickView's idea of in memory storage one step further, in the fact that for them it's going to be for the cube itself. This means that you should still be able to use MDX calculations against your cube.
Secondly, this also puts an emphasis on the capabilities of Excel and SharePoint and the way they work with BI. Microsoft is pushing the capabilities of Excel even further, after making Excel 2007 a better cube viewer and enhancing its Data Mining capabilities. This is on top of empowering Excel itself and turning it into Excel Server. Now, Excel should become the staging area for power users to create their own cube models and share them, after publishing them to SharePoint. So in that sense I feel like Microsoft is also leveraging its capabilities in work portals and data collaboration around the organization with Excel and SharePoint. All in all, very exciting news.
For more details about these projects, please refer to the recent posts from Chris Webb, Mosha Pasumansky and Marco Russo.