This past week the Microsoft BI Conference was held in Redmond and there were a few interesting announcements. I first heard about "Kilimanjaro" and was assuming this was SQL 11s since it was announced as the next release of SQL Server. However since then I've heard that it's not SQL Server 11 but something else.
In case you're wondering, SQL Server 2005 was SQL Server v9, SQL Server 2008 was v10, and SQL 11 is the next version.
Ted Kummert, who is the VP in charge of the groups working on SQL Server, talked about Kilimanjaro enriching SQL Server's BI capabilities. I still think BI is very hard to do well, but I can see pieces of it trickling down into Excel and who knows, maybe I'll be wrong and we'll see more and more BI installations of SSAS in smaller companies. It sounds like Microsoft is working on strengthening the BI capabilities of SQL Server to handle larger environments and even make more "self-service" capabilities using project "Gemini."
I'm wary of self-service since I think it still requires a lot of setup and configuration from IT people, and tends to mislead executives into thinking they need less IT staff. I haven't seen Reporting Services work without IT support and writing reports is simpler than almost anything. However that's not to say the Report Builder and other tools don't work for end-users; it's just that they need IT support.
There was one other project mentioned, project Madison, which is new solution for massive scalability of data warehouses. The demo system was 150TB, 24 instances of a shared nothing system that ran a Reporting Services report querying a 1 trillion row system and returning in seconds. Granted things were tuned and setup to work well, but this is still very impressive.
I haven't seen much about what else might be included in this next version, but I've seen a few reports that this will ship in the first half of 2010, which is 18 months away. That's half of the cycle we've been talking about for SQL Server versions and I'm not sure if this is an "R2" type version of a full version. In any case, it means lots of work for those of us that report on this stuff, and probably not much of a change for most of you.
Except now you might have a choice of upgrading every 4th version instead of every other one.
Steve Jones
Steve's Pick of the Week
SQL Server Support in a Hardware Virtualization Environment - The PSS engineers have a great blog post that talks about the support policy for SQL Server in virtual environments. With lots of people considering virtualization, be sure you know the support policy as it's not the same as non-virtual environments.
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
or now on iTunes!
- Windows Media Podcast - 27.5MB WMV
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Today's podcast features music by Incompetech. Kevin Macleod has some great compositions in all genres of music. Check him out at www.incompetech.com.
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