I have posted several entries lately about events that I’ve been attending, speaking and listening at and one of the most interesting ones was the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Partner Airlift Event. This is a chance for MS to show off all the new cool features in an upcoming release and while R2 is an interim release for some features the BI integration features are stellar. This includes the new power pivot support, SharePoint 2010 support and integration, unicode compression and other great features.

We had a chance to run through each feature with great reps from the product teams and had a great experience with them. We also got to have some fun in Seattle and I even got to steal away and see some of the coastline.

Pragmatic Works got to go in with the most experience on Microsoft’s Fast Track Architecture under our belts being the only partner to successfully deliver them so far. In addition we are one of the partners on the list for advanced PDW or Parallel Data Warehousing training on the new Massively Parallel Processing appliance architecture. This is all very exciting but it just give us more avenues to help you make BI real in your organization.

More on this soon! Keep it simple.

Adam