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Blog: William McKnight

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September 27, 2007

Office 14 and MDM

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.

Continue reading "Office 14 and MDM" »

Posted by William McKnight at 1:31 PM | | Comments (0)

May 25, 2007

Microsoft SQL Server Katmai and Performance Point Server dates

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.

Continue reading "Microsoft SQL Server Katmai and Performance Point Server dates" »

Posted by William McKnight at 9:21 AM | | Comments (0)

May 24, 2007

Microsoft Master Data Management and Microsoft Data Quality

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

Posted by William McKnight at 1:26 PM | | Comments (0)

January 23, 2007

Choosing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for Data Warehousing

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.

Continue reading "Choosing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for Data Warehousing" »

Posted by William McKnight at 12:56 PM | | Comments (2)

April 4, 2006

Microsoft agrees to acquire ProClarity

File this one under the "who didn't see this coming?" category. Or maybe if you have an "it's about time" category, it could go there. Microsoft SQL Server, especially with SQL 2005, is very focused on business intelligence. However, they have been unable to completely provide end-to-end capability. Their Analysis Services cubes need a front-end to be useful to users and the basic one provided with SQL Server was never quite enough.

ProClarity has always focused on this market and have created quite a few different data access and analytical offerings over the years that work with Analysis Services. So, yesterday, Microsoft announced its acquisition of ProClarity. ProClarity offerings have long been recommended to SQL Server clients by Microsoft. Now, it just got easier.

Posted by William McKnight at 10:06 AM | | Comments (0)

October 24, 2005

SQL Server 2005 data mining

As a couple of comments have indicated (link1, link2), the data mining capabilities of SQL Server 2005 are much improved. SQL Server 2000 had decision tree and clustering algorithms.

SQL Server 2005 adds these 5:
Time Series
Sequence Clustering
Naive Bayes
Association Rules
Neural Nets

Through the efforts of Microsoft in SQL Server 2005 as well as others before them like Polyvista, data mining is well on the way to being out of the back room with the scientists and into the hands of the analyst end-user.

Data mining is often the true analytical end result desired, yet many fear the complexities involved and do patchwork mining step-by-step, often bailing out before achieving the desired result or accepting a result with only the limited data that was able to be included without using true data mining.

Both data mining and desktop OLAP should be presented as first alternatives for end users, depending on the requirements of course. Education of end users will be key to acceptance,

Posted by William McKnight at 1:32 PM | | Comments (2)

October 19, 2005

Not so fuzzy

Occassionally, a vendor will come up with a new feature that you didn't think of, but once you see it, you find immediate application for it. Such is the case with 2 new features in SQL Server 2005's SSIS (Integration Services, the successor to Data Transformation Services). They're called fuzzy lookup and fuzzy grouping.

Continue reading "Not so fuzzy" »

Posted by William McKnight at 8:40 PM | | Comments (1)

October 10, 2005

SQL Server 2005 is almost here

At CSI, we have a Center of Excellence where we put new releases of BI products through the paces in order to stay on top of the market for our clients.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is about to live up to its title and get released here in 2005. There are quite a few important advances in this release. For those primarily involved with other database management systems, these enhancements may seem like "it's about time." However, some of these, especially the scalability-related items like 64-bit and addressable memory support and reliability items like security controls and improved failover clustering, that have been used to rule out SQL Server for upper-mid and large (i.e., terabyte) mission critical data warehouses are no longer limitations in SQL Server.

Here's some initial points of interest on SQL 2005.....

Continue reading "SQL Server 2005 is almost here" »

Posted by William McKnight at 6:59 PM | | Comments (2)

September 27, 2005

Microsoft and SMB

One of my assertions recently has been that the business intelligence industry is momentarily distracted by the high end deals. Recent titan acquisitons (Ascential, Siebel) are clearly focused on bringing in the Fortune level customer. We now see some balance being brought into the equation. Microsoft has never neglected the lower end BI customer. Actually, you could say they have not neglected the lower end anything customer.

Microsoft is "on the hunt for SMBs" according to a recent article.

As well, their SQL Server product has always had appeal to SMBs for business intelligence. SQL Server 2005 has a launch on November 7 in San Francisco. Every major city will have an event related to this launch. SQL Server should be released on or about that date. I have been analyzing SQL 2005 for business intelligence and will provide that analysis here at a later date. But I can say that I'm excited about the BI possibilities for SMBs.

Posted by William McKnight at 8:49 AM | | Comments (1)