Recently in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Category

Microsoft has so many components to their SQL Server family, the standard pitch on SQL Server never gets old. Awareness is paramount to Microsoft's success as it tries to integrate acqusitions (latest: Tetris, FAST) and keep spreading its wings within existing clients and, really, aren't we all Microsoft clients at some level?

Microsoft's philosophy is "BI should be like electricity, it's just there" and "integrating bi into the world in which people work." This philosophy makes sense in Microsoft's world because Microsoft products are like electricity (i.e., Office). Therefore, BI will surface within the Office environment. For example, there are users of Performance Point who don't know they're using it and think they're just using Excel.

Furthermore, they promote BI in 3 contexts: personal (built by me, used by me), team (built by team, for team) and organizational BI (built by IT for use in company) whereas most vendors only focus on the last context.

Sharepoint is going to be increasingly important for BI. Kristine put it this way: Sharepoint is for delivery, Office/Office PPS 2007 is for end user tools and performance management applications and SQL 2005 is for the RDBMS, ETL, OLAP and reporting.

Finally, I was glad to see some emphasis on, and apparent uptick in usage of, data mining in SQL Server, which could be instrumental in taking information exploitation to new levels.

Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, Microsoft, SQL Server

Leave it to Microsoft to make technology inexpensive and easy. Quite possibly (i.e., link) Office 14 will begin to include the Stratature Master Data Management (MDM) acquisiton. Microsoft has helped to demystify data warehousing and data mining and now begins to do the same with MDM.

For the MDM market, this is a partial verification and will expose MDM to a wider audience. Those who are opposed to Microsoft philosophically or don't believe it will scale will go elsewise for their tool.

Tools are a start, but can obfuscate the need to address data quality, still the largest impediment to information management success.

At the Information Management Conference 2007 in Copenhagen this week, Marin Bezic, SQL Business Intelligence product manager, Microsoft EMEA, provided the following timetables:

Performance Point Server:
April 2007: CTP2
Summer 2007: CTP3
2H2007: GA

SQL Server “Katmai”:
June ’07 (at TechEd US): Public disclosure
Every 60 days thereafter: Public CTPs
2008: GA

The themes for Katmai are mission critical platform, dynamic development and end-to-end business insight.

At the Information Management Conference 2007 in Copenhagen yesterday, in response to the question “Will we see Master Data Repository and Data Quality tools from Microsoft?”, Marin Bezic, SQL Business Intelligence product manager, Microsoft EMEA replied, after a pause, “yes.”

Something to look forward to.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, SQL Server, Master Data Management, Data Quality

My latest white paper is available at www.microsoft.com. The title is "Choosing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for Data Warehousing" and it is about choosing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for data warehousing. ;-)

If you're looking at building a data warehouse, or the rearchitecture of an existing data warehouse, and may consider the Microsoft solution, I go through the various components of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and place them into a data warehouse environment.