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November 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft SQL Server Preview Rolls in More BI Features

TAGS: Enterprise Application Integration

With its latest generation of enterprise platform elements, Microsoft has taken the "customer technology preview," or CTP, to a whole new level, releasing waves of new features into the hands of evaluators. Perhaps the best example of that is the series of SQL Server 2008 previews.

Ironically, the latest Microsoft SQL Server 2008 CTP was released on November 12, the same day that news of the IBM acquisition of Cognos broke. Both the latest SQL Server CTP and the Cognos acquisition are signs of how BI features continue to be bundled into the database server -- reducing the breathing room for tools vendors who have stayed focused on reporting.

IBM bought Cognos, SAP bought Business Objects, and Oracle bought Hyperion -- leaving SAS as the last remaining major enterprise BI player not yet in the belly of a major database applications player. But most of this movement has been to prop up larger players.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has built on its own BI market share with the completion of its acquisition of ProClarity last year and the release of its PerformancePoint Server 2007 for the "executive dashboard" view of BI, building out from the "data mart" approach that won Microsoft its leading share of the BI market in the first place.

Microsoft refers to the collective BI features of SQL Server 2008's previews as "Pervasive Insight." New in the November CTP are tools for creating more optimized analysis cubes and cross-database aggregations, added atop a pile of potentially performance-boosting technologies. And SQL Server can certainly use the help there, as its performance in OLAP and MOLAP queries is often poor, and optimizing SQL Server performance is a bit of a dark art.

But can another set of wizards really fix that issue? I'm not so sure. What the tools could do effectively is keep novice users from really screwing up cube query sets, and that in itself should be something of a performance boost for many of Microsoft's OLAP users. It also might be just enough to keep them from wandering off to find something else.

Posted by Sean Gallagher on November 28, 2007 03:00 AM

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