We’re pretty excited about Superior Consulting Services VP of Technology Brian Larson’s most recent BI book, Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2012.  Not only is our team excited, but the industry is buzzing with insights from the book.

In fact, SearchSQLServer recently provided an excerpt from the book for its readers. To follow up on that successful post, Associate Editor Lena J. Weiner connected with Brian to chat about the book and SQL Server Business Intelligence. Her interview offers information on industry trends and the book, as well as great insights into Brian and his expertise.

We invite you to stop by SearchSQLServer and check out Brian’s interview. Then come back here to share your thoughts, comments and questions – we’d love to hear them!

Many companies are beginning to bring external data into their data infrastructure.  One of the most common and easily available types of external data is weather data.

There are several excellent sources of weather data.  If you need historical weather data then Fetch Climate is a great resource.  The data has been combined from many sources and patched together into a consistent whole.  The Microsoft Research project was conceived of and led by Drew Purves.

Fetch Climate doesn’t include current weather data, though. Recently I was working with a client that needed a daily average temperature inserted into a table in their SQL Server database.  Another resource on the web, Weather Underground, publishes current daily weather data. It also has an API that you can program against.  Since there isn’t much documentation out there about how to connect to the Weather Underground API using a .Net client, I decided to document how I accessed it and inserted the data into SQL Server using a CLR assembly.

The first step is to sign up for a developers account on Weather Underground.  This will give you a personal key that you can use to authenticate against the API.  The free Developer account gives you 500 API calls per day for free.  This should be plenty to get started and it’s easy to upgrade later if your business case justifies it.

You use a http request to call the API and it returns either a JSON or XML object with the requested weather data included.  Since we’ll be accessing the API using .Net, XML will be the easiest to parse.  We’ll need to create a C# Class Library to store the code for the SQL Server CLR library.  I used Visual Studio 2010 as the development environment.

The end result that we want to achieve is a SQL function that takes a date and a Weather Underground key and returns a decimal with the average temperature for that day.  We’ll use the .Net XML library as well as the SQL Server API to achieve this end.  The code that can fetch the data looks like:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Data.SqlTypes;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Server;

public partial class WeatherUndergroundFunctions
{

public const string weatherUndergroundAddress =
“http://api.wunderground.com/api/{0}/history_{1}/q/MN/Minneapolis.xml”;

public const string tempXPath = “/response/history/observations/observation/tempi”;
[SqlFunction()]
public static SqlDecimal getDailyAverageTemperature(SqlDateTime tempDate, SqlString
weatherUndergroundKey)

{

string formattedDate = tempDate.Value.ToString(“yyyyMMdd”);

decimal totalTemp = 0;

decimal observationCount = 0;

XmlDocument xmlTemp = new XmlDocument();
xmlTemp.Load(string.Format(weatherUndergroundAddress,

weatherUndergroundKey.ToString(), formattedDate));

foreach(XmlNode obs in xmlTemp.SelectNodes(tempXPath))

{

totalTemp += Convert.ToDecimal(obs.InnerText);
observationCount += 1;

}

return new SqlDecimal(totalTemp/observationCount);

}

}

Let’s walk through a few parts of this code.  The weatherUndergroundAddress variable stores the http address to fetch the weather for Minneapolis.  It’s simple to get weather data for any major U.S. city by substituting its state code and name into the URL.  We’ll substitute the key and date into the string as parameters.  The tempXPath stores the path to extract the temperature from the XML.  There are multiple temperature readings per day that the code averages out.

The first step in the function code creates a new XmlDocument to store the retrieved XML.  This variable is then loaded by using Load to retrieve data from the http address.  A foreach loop then averages out the temperatures during the day and finally the result is returned to the caller.

At this point I created an application to wrap the library in for testing.  It was simply a C# Console project with a reference to the class library.  I’ll provide the code, but won’t go into detail on it.  It simply displays the average temperature to the console window.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Data.SqlTypes;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;
using System.Xml;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Server;

namespace WeatherUndergroundTestApp
{

class WeatherUndergroundTestApp
{

static void Main(string[] args)
{

SqlDateTime yesterday = new SqlDateTime(DateTime.Today.AddDays(-1));
SqlString key = new SqlString(“<your_api_key_here>”);
SqlDecimal avgTemp =

WeatherUndergroundFunctions.getDailyAverageTemperature(yesterday, key);
Console.WriteLine(“Average Temp: ” + avgTemp.ToString());

 Thread.Sleep(5000);

}

}

}

Once the class library has been tested successfully, all we need to do is to install the assembly into SQL Server as a CLR library.  Be sure to enable CLR before you take the next steps.  The first step is to make sure that the database will run the CLR code securely.  Two ways to do this are to cryptographically sign the code and the other is to set the TRUSTWORTHY property to ON.  Be sure to understand the implications of this choice in your own environment.  We’ll use the TRUSTWORTHY property to keep things simple.

USE Sandbox
GO
 
ALTER DATABASE Sandbox SET TRUSTWORTHY ON
GO

CREATE ASSEMBLY WeatherUnderground
FROM ‘C:\CLR Code\WeatherUnderground\WeatherUndergroundFunctions.dll’
WITH PERMISSION_SET = EXTERNAL_ACCESS
GO
 
Next we’ll create a function that uses the assembly.  This is essentially a wrapper for the CLR function.
 
CREATE FUNCTION dbo.getDailyAverageTemperature(@tempDate DATETIME,
@weatherUndergroundKey NVARCHAR(30))
RETURNS DECIMAL(10,2)
AS EXTERNAL NAME
WeatherUnderground.WeatherUndergroundFunctions.getDailyAverageTemperature
 
Finally we’ll test the function.
 
SELECT dbo.getDailyAverageTemperature(DATEADD(DAY,-1,GETDATE()), N’<your_api_key_here>’)
 

Once the function has been created you can use it like any other function in SQL Server.

As a software developer, I’ll be the first to admit that my testing skills are mediocre at best. I develop good software but when I test, I tend to only test the “happy path”.  Maybe that’s because I have brought a software application to life, the last thing I want to do is break it. Quite a long time ago, the concept of Quality Assurance came about. Some companies have embraced it and some companies feel it is something they can do without. For enterprise level applications, I would recommend embracing it.

It is a software testers’ job to first test that the application does what it is supposed to do according to the requirements/functional specifications – “happy path”. Once that passes, the dreaded negative testing begins. This is where a tester can get creative. Things like, “I put the values ‘!@#$%’ in the zip code field and your application crashed”. Of course my response is “Why would anyone do that”. Testers reply, “Because they can”. “Fine, I’ll fix it”, grrrrrrr.

The place I am currently consulting at uses a commercial software application for tracking bugs. I have grown to dislike this bug tracking software for the wrong reasons. It is actually a quite simple application that does its job well. A tester enters a bug title, description and status (there is other stuff but you get the idea). Then they assign it to me and an automated e-mail shows up in my inbox– this message is never good news. Now what did they find? This negative testing keeps pulling me away from my next project. I roll my eyes at the QA person as I pass her in the hall. She gives me the look that says “Sorry but I’m just doing my job”. We don’t exchange words.

Meanwhile on the other side of things, the Project Manager is sending the tester e-mails every hour checking on the status and practically looking over their shoulder as the deadline to move into production is looming.

For the reasons I stated above, I suspect that the software tester is not the most popular person in the office on certain days. They are, however, an integral part of the software development process.  So the next time you feel like barking at someone in QA, give them a break, their job is not easy and they are under a lot of pressure to release quality applications.

What happens when you talk about IT infrastructure? Do people immediately lower their geek shields? Probably. Let’s face it: IT infrastructure doesn’t sound as cool as the latest mobile app. It’s all about boring hardware and cabling and maintaining the status quo, right? It is, until some little blip on the radar shuts down access to the ‘net or a tornado does a drive-by or a worm invades your system. Then suddenly, everybody cares about IT infrastructure. When it’s good, it goes unnoticed. When something bad happens, IT infrastructure takes center stage (along with complaints from grumpy workaholics jonesing for a digital fix). IT infrastructure resiliency planning is designed to minimize these scenarios.

The Evolution of IT Infrastructure Planning
IT infrastructure planning has long focused on reducing downtime and eliminating threats. From the IT infrastructure manager who ran the “hurricane committee” to cross-functional business continuity planning, the process of IT infrastructure planning has evolved over time. The next step: IT infrastructure resiliency planning. Prompted somewhat by widespread availability of cloud computing, managed services and other innovations that transfer functional operations to third parties, IT infrastructure resiliency planning can achieve optimal and continuous infrastructure operations regardless of whether systems reside internally or elsewhere.

What Does IT Infrastructure Resiliency Planning Do?
IT infrastructure resiliency planning combines the practices of business continuity and disaster recovery to more effectively address ebbs, flows, glitches and steady-state operations. The reality is that all businesses face threats to their operations. In a 24/7 world, you cannot plan for 100% up time all the time. The sophistication of technology today and widespread dependence on it means the likelihood of a threat is extremely high.

Tips for Shifting toward IT Infrastructure Resiliency Planning
For a business to achieve infrastructure resiliency, it must be able to rapidly rebound from disruptions and react to the diverse dynamics of a multi-resource, multi-system IT environment. Here are several ways to start increasing resiliency:

Identify ALL Vulnerabilities
Identify all IT infrastructure risks with IT teams, business teams and third-party providers. Catalog vulnerabilities and risks to serve as a foundation for building a complete resiliency plan.
Bring DR and BC Together
Both disaster recovery, which focuses on bringing systems back up, and business continuity, which focuses on maintaining consistent business (not merely IT) operations, offer practices, data and tools to improve business resiliency. Bring these two groups together to see where separate practices can be combined or refined to improve IT’s ability to react to challenges.
Address Third-Party Providers
Work with third-party IT infrastructure, application and service providers to define resiliency expectations. Have your cloud applications been assessed for resiliency? Do your providers have their own resiliency programs in place? What metrics define them? You should have clear expectations about provider processes and responses to disruptions.

And Test It!
As with all things IT, testing can show you exactly how resilient your IT infrastructure is. Regularly test your IT infrastructure planning and performance to ensure systems bounce back and to identify new risks.

Reach out to our team at SCS to help you strategize the best approach to IT infrastructure resiliency planning.
Call 952-890-0606 or email us at SCS@teamscs.com.

]]> http://www.teamscs.com/2013/01/it-infrastructure-resiliency-planning-ready-your-geek-shields/feed/ 0 http://www.teamscs.com/2012/12/15-years-of-teamwork-technology-solutions/ http://www.teamscs.com/2012/12/15-years-of-teamwork-technology-solutions/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2012 23:01:27 +0000 admin http://www.teamscs.com/?p=1029 Continue reading →]]> They say that if you start a business and make it to the one-year anniversary, you have accomplished something big. As we wrap up 2012 and near the end of our 15th anniversary year of providing businesses with smart technology solutions, SCS is having lot of fun remembering what it is that has allowed us to accomplish so much:

The Team – When SCS started out, the URL we picked for the website was “Team SCS.” That is because outside of family (a truly special word), we believe “team” is the best word to represent a cohesive, steadfast unit. Our team focus has always been one of our very best attributes. SCS is more than a business or a place to work because we are a team first—a team of highly committed, hardworking, fun-loving and talented colleagues with a shared commitment to improving the technology solutions, performance and capabilities of our clients.
The Service – “Superior” is a part of our name, Superior Consulting Services, and it’s also what we always strive to be—a provider of superior consulting and technology solutions. By setting the service bar to the highest standards, SCS ensures clients get the market’s very best—superior technology solutions that will make their businesses better.
The Focus – SCS decided 15 years ago we were never going to be an AFAB (Anything for a Buck) business. In the early days, SCS was a focused Microsoft technology consulting company with two business units: Custom Application Development and Network Services and Support. Today we have grown to four business units after adding Business Intelligence and Special Projects to our offering. This strategic growth has increased the value and technology solutions we provide without risking our focus on developing concentrated areas of expertise.
The Clients & the Staff – A company doesn’t make it to 15 years providing technology solutions in a competitive market without great employees and outstanding clients. Through the years, SCS has enjoyed and appreciated the loyalty of many clients who have been with us since day one. In the same vein, we pride ourselves on an average employee tenure of five-plus years. Several of our employees have been with us since our earliest days and have made us the growing success we are today.

Fifteen years later, I can still remember the discussions we had as we worked to name our company. We wondered if using words like “superior” or “best” might be perceived as arrogant. I am very glad we were not shy about setting the bar very high and using superior to describe our services and business. That choice has shaped how we work, how we serve, how we collaborate, how we innovate and how we grow.

I want to end by thanking the employees, clients, partners and friends who have helped SCS become the superior company we envisioned so many years ago. We couldn’t have done it without you and look forward to delivering continued superior service throughout 2013 and beyond.

I attended the Twin Cities’ Microsoft BI User Group recently and was in a conversation with a gentleman who asked me the question:  “The Tabular BI Semantic model.  Hmm.  What is it useful for?  It sounds small-scale, like it would only be used for smaller projects – you probably wouldn’t ever roll it out into production in an enterprise, right?

Many people have this perception.  The Tabular BI Semantic Model – the technology describing a database on a tabular instance of Microsoft Analysis Services that utilizes the xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (formerly VertiPaq) – has an image problem.  It has also seen a bit of resistance among professionals who have built their career on multi-dimensional data in Analysis Services cubes.  Why would Microsoft provide another technology for analytical reporting?  Isn’t the multi-dimensional semantic model (the OLAP cube) good enough?

This posting will take a look at some rationale for using the tabular BI semantic model in two areas:  (1) what were some of Microsoft’s stated intentions that led to the formation of the tabular BI Semantic Model, and (2) what are some business cases for which it is well suited?  Along these lines, we’ll compare the tabular model side-by-side with the multi-dimensional model, evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of both.

Does the World Need a New Data Model

The world has accepted, even loves, Microsoft Analysis Services.  It has seen adoption by some huge customers around the world who wish to slice-and-dice quickly through data, particularly in a fast and interactive way, in a multi-dimensional database, often referred to as a cube.

But that didn’t happen overnight.  It has taken years for Microsoft to perfect Analysis Services’ multi-dimensional data modeling, and for developers to develop their skills in schema-tizing that data, and for users to query that data with the MDX query language.  And that didn’t happen until after their enterprise decided to invest time and money in developing solutions of which the cube is an integral part.  It had always been seen as a high-price-point leap into luxury, a long-term prospect, until the release of SQL Server 2005.  And today – particularly with enhancements added in SQL Server 2008, and 2008 R2, it is well within reach of small and medium-size organizations and has gained much greater acceptance.

With the Tabular BI Semantic Model, Microsoft has provided an alternative for those who have not yet put all their eggs into Analysis Services cubes.  Now there are two Analysis Services server modes – Tabular, and Multi-Dimensional.  If you install Analysis Services in Tabular mode, you use it to serve up Tabular BI semantic models.  If you install Analysis Services in multi-dimensional mode, you use it to serve up cubes (now called a “multi-dimensional BI semantic model”).  It is hoped and expected that the Tabular model will make life much easier for the business intelligence developer, user, and the enterprise at large, to adopt Analysis Services.

Multi-Dimensional or Tabular?

Now faced with the choice between modeling your data as a cube, and modeling it in a tabular manner, what are some factors that affect that decision?  Can you convert a cube into a tabular model, and vice-versa?  What are some real-world characteristics of the tabular BI semantic model that make it the best choice for my immediate need?  What features does one type of model offer that the other does not?

Because tabular is the newer solution, you might think that migrating an existing multidimensional solution to a tabular format is the correct course of action, but this is usually not the case. Tabular does not supersede multidimensional, and the two formats are not interchangeable. Unless you have a specific reason to do so, do not rebuild an existing multidimensional solution if it is already meeting the needs of your organization. For new projects, consider the tabular approach. It will be faster to design, test, and deploy; and it will work better with the latest self-service BI applications from Microsoft.^[1]

The following table will attempt to break down some of the key benefits of analysis services, and compare if/how each type of model provides that benefit.

A Note about PowerPivot

PowerPivot allows a semantic model to be constructed and used within a Microsoft Excel workbook, and it can also leverage Excel Services and SharePoint, required for shared server usage.  By and large, the characteristics described for a tabular BI semantic model also apply to a model created with PowerPivot; however, PowerPivot has these unique characteristics relative to the tabular BI model in standalone Analysis Services:

-          There is a 2 Gb artificial size limitation caused by the fact that the xVelocity engine isn’t a standalone server in this instance; rather, it exists as an internal component of a PowerPIvot for SharePoint installation and is therefore subject to limits for uploading files to SharePoint.

-          Certain data sources aren’t compatible with PowerPivot use on a SharePoint server.  On a desktop, you have access to data provided by Microsoft Office data connectivity components.

-          PowerPivot workbooks are secured at the file level, using SharePoint permissions

A very good general overview providing more detail can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh212940.aspx

A detailed whitepaper providing usage and feature comparisons can be found here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh994774.aspx

Superior Consulting Services (SCS) has been a Microsoft Partner since 1998 and received Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status in 2006. In 2012, with evolution of the Microsoft Partner program, SCS is now recognized for its expertise in the following competencies:

• Gold – Business Intelligence
• Gold – Web Development
• Silver – Data Platform
• Silver — Software Development
• Silver – Midmarket Solution Provider

Our gold competency is evidence of a deep, consistent commitment to the Business Intelligence and Web Development solution offerings and is a distinction given to just one percent of Microsoft partners worldwide. Our silver competencies also demonstrate a strong dedication to Data Platform, Software Development and Midmarket Solutions and is awarded to the top 5 percent of Microsoft’s worldwide partners. These designations, together with our close working relationship with Microsoft, give us:

• Fast access to a variety of resources and support
• Real-time knowledge of the latest Microsoft applications
• The ability to deliver leading-edge business intelligence, reports, applications, web and midmarket solutions for our clients’ solutions using Microsoft tools

A little bit of time investigating the code base and running diagnostics revealed the cause: searching was being driven by a 3,000 line, dynamic SQL generating stored procedure. The search supported over sixty different parameters, included some important reporting logic, and changing the parameters or logic was not an option. Aside from crippling the server, everything about the search was fine. A highly customizable search with many possible criteria is an excellent use case for dynamic SQL. So why was the performance so terrible? The implementation neglected some key considerations, but a few straightforward structural changes resulted in sizeable performance gains.

First and foremost, the search was not making good use of parameters. The dynamically generated SQL had criteria values directly inserted in the statement, rather than using parameters. For example, say the search requested customer data for a particular customer, specified by ID. It would generate statements of the form:

                SELECT Name,Address,Phone FROM Customer WHERE CustomerID = 1000

Rather than:

                SELECT Name,Address,Phone FROM Customer WHERE CustomerID = @CustomerID

This negatively impacts the query in a number of ways. Writing the criteria values directly in to the SQL statement causes every search to be treated as separate query. So, a search for customer #1000 and one for customer #1001 would not be able to share cached query execution plans. SQL server does have an automatic parameterization feature to handle simple cases such as this example, but the actual search was far too complex for it to be useful. Not being able to share execution plans means that searches will end up being compiled every time, unless the exact same search ran recently enough to have a plan in the cache. Recompiling a complex search on every execution in a high traffic environment put a significant and unnecessary load on the server’s CPU. Considering also that directly inserting values in the query string opens the door to SQL injection attacks, using parameters is clearly the better design.

The second issue with the search procedure was that it did entirely too much processing. This was caused by the fact that the search had evolved over many years, with many different developers working on it. Most of the parameters were supplied as concatenated within a single string parameter, which the procedure then split, parsed, and assigned to local variables. Results were gathered and filtered in stages, requiring the use of several temporary tables, which did not have indexes and were not dropped at the end of the procedure. User defined functions were fairly often employed in WHERE clauses. Refactoring the search procedure to make each parameter an actual parameter, eliminating the need for a large – and therefore, costly – amount of up front string manipulation. The load put on the server’s tempdb was eased by condensing the result selection down to a single dynamic query using one properly indexed temporary table, and dropping that table at the end of the procedure. Removing, in-lining, or moving calls to UDFs enabled the query optimizer to get a better picture of what was happening, and eliminated expensive per-row function executions.

These relatively simple architectural changes had a dramatic effect on the query’s performance. Controlled testing showed that, at a minimum, the new version was ten times faster. The refactor also allowed for elimination of some costly corner cases, which were being frequently hit. This resulted in a speed improvement of over one hundred fold in these instances. Not only did these changes prevent the server from slowing to a standstill, but they made it much less difficult to update the SQL in the future. The end result: a huge boost in performance, easy maintenance, and an ecstatic client.

Superior Consulting Services has been offering solutions like this to our clients for over 15 years.  If you or someone you know is in need of assistance, our team is here to guide you.  Please visit our website at http://www.teamscs.com/ and discover how we can help you!

That’s right, FoxPro – Visual FoxPro 3.0 to be exact. That was our tool of choice when SCS began. Don’t laugh! We did a lot of FoxPro work in those early days. In fact, up until a few years ago, we were still doing some FoxPro work for an organization that was one of our initial, and ultimately, long-term clients.

FoxPro gave us our start and it was a staple on the development side for a number of years. In many ways, FoxPro was ahead of its time with features like object-oriented programming and imbedded SQL query code long before those things existed in products like Visual Basic. It was a good platform for learning solid object-oriented programming and database development techniques, but it did have its limitations.

From the very beginning, FoxPro was not the only database in our arsenal. John came back from one of his early sales calls for SCS saying there were no opportunities at this organization because they were looking for help with something called Microsoft SQL Server and we only knew FoxPro. I informed John that SQL Server projects were just the type of work we wanted. That was where our future lay. And I had recently passed the SQL Server 6.5 certification exam, so I was practically an expert.

Well, I wasn’t an expert and had a lot to learn about SQL Server, but we did get the gig and we did learn. In fact, this organization was assigned client number 1 in billing system. That initial SQL Server assignment turned into another long-term relationship and this organization is still an active client today.

Early on, we dabbled in a number of technology areas. On the network side, we did Novell, and UNIX support. However, we found our best opportunities and expertise in the area of Windows networking, so this eventually became our focus. On the development side, we did projects using C/C++, PowerBuilder, Access, Java, and Cold Fusion. Through all of this, however, we had the most success using Microsoft development tools – Visual Basic and ASP, then C#, VB.NET and ASPX.

For roughly the first half of our existence, SCS had these two major focus areas: networking and development. Our third major focus area, business intelligence, became an official practice in 2009, but was part of the SCS technology landscape long before that. Our entry into the world of business intelligence came by way of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, a product we can truly say we were involved in from the very beginning.

During a slow period in 2002, an SCS consultant named Marty Voegele got tired of sitting on the bench and decided to call his past contacts to try and drum up some work. One of those contacts was on the SQL Server development team at Microsoft. It turned out that Microsoft was looking for help creating a new reporting tool code named Rosetta and eventually known as Reporting Services. Through this contact, SCS was contracted to develop major portions of the first report rendering engine and the first version of the PDF renderer for Reporting Services.

We liked Reporting Services as a reporting tool from the start – although we may have been biased given our involvement with its beginnings. We did a number of report authoring projects using Reporting Services. This quickly led to involvement in the wider area of business intelligence, using tools like SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Integration Services, PowerPivot, and SharePoint. We were also able to turn our early involvement with Reporting Services into authorship. SCS now has four consultants who are or soon will be published book authors on the topic of Microsoft business intelligence.

Things certainly have changed over the years. The view from our high-rise office space serves to emphasize how far we have come as a company from that initial handshake 15 years ago. It is also amazing to think how far technology has advanced in those 15 years. We can now do things with a few mouse clicks that would have taken lines and lines of code along with hours of set up and configuration back in 1997 – or simply weren’t possible. Sharing information around the world. Managing databases that are now measured in terabytes. Analyzing and reporting on millions of rows of data in just a second or two.

As we look back over 15 years, we also want to look forward. Within the SCS areas of focus, there are a number of changes looming on the horizon or already upon us. Cloud computing is leading us from networking to the broader world of infrastructure. The proliferation of smart phones and tablets will take our development into the realm of mobile computing. Powerful and intuitive ad hoc analysis tools have brought us from business intelligence to the age of self-service insight.

Through it all, however, one thing has not changed. That is our approach to technology here at SCS. From the very beginning, our focus has been on using technology to solve business problems. Our goal has never been to utilize these wiz-bang tools for their own sake, but to harness their capabilities to help our clients meet their business objectives.

I can’t complete this reflection without thanking the SCS employees, clients, and partners who have made this possible. Across those 15 years, you have made SCS an exciting and extremely rewarding place to work, to learn, and to grow. As we move into the next 15 years at SCS, I look forward to working together to maintain SCS as a leader in our areas of technology focus and to continually help our clients achieve business success.

Sneak Preview: The Best of SQL Server 2012 from the Microsoft Development Team

We’ve made it to December, which means 2012 is just around the corner. With the coming of the new year also comes a new release of SQL Server. The SQL Server 2012 release adds a number of innovative features to the SQL Server platform. After working with early versions of this new release for over a year now, we at SCS are extremely excited about the capabilities coming down the pike.

To get Microsoft’s take on the SQL Server 2012 release, SCS took time to touch base with two important figures in its creation.

  T.K. Anand is the Principal Group Program Manager responsible for Analysis Services and PowerPivot. He has been with Microsoft for 15 year, contributing to every major SQL Server release since SQL Server 7.0.

  Thierry D’Hers is the Principal Group Program Manager responsible for Reporting Services. He is one of Microsoft’s main BI evangelists and has been with Microsoft since 1999.

We asked T.K. and Thierry a series of questions to discover their views on the business impact of the upcoming SQL Server release.

____________________________________________________________________________________

1. What new features of SQL Server 2012 offer the most opportunities, will have the greatest impact, and/or provide the greatest return for organizations? 

Thierry: SQL Server 2012 is a very feature rich release for SQL Server. It provides many great new benefits for all personas.

T.K.: Some of the features that I expect will have huge impact on our customers and partners:

• SQL Server AlwaysOn is an integrated high availability and disaster recovery solution that will deliver uptime and data protection for the most mission critical OLTP applications.
• The ColumnStore index (based on the Vertipaq™ technology introduced in PowerPivot) can improve data warehouse query performance by orders of magnitude.
• Power View is a brand new data exploration, visualization and reporting experience that will enable end users to gain insights from their data and have fun while doing it.
• The BI Semantic Model represents the next generation of Analysis Services and is the BI platform that all end user experiences (including Power View) will be based upon.
• Master Data Services and Data Quality Services will enable enterprises to better manage the quality and consistency of their business data.

There are a lot more features in SQL Server 2012 than what I can possibly talk about in this blog post. I encourage readers to visit http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver to learn more.

2. We have heard it said that SQL Server 2012 democratizes business data (intelligence). Can you explain what that means and how SQL Server achieves that?

Thierry: Thank you for asking this question which allows me to talk about one of our great innovations in this release: Project Crescent, officially named Power View. Power View is an ad hoc reporting and visual exploration capability that enables any end users to answer business questions and gain insights from its data with two to three clicks to results.

T.K.: Since the introduction of Analysis Services and Reporting Services, SQL Server has been instrumental in democratizing BI by making it possible for Developers and IT Professionals to build and manage BI solutions with low TCO [Total Cost of Ownership]. SQL Server 2012 takes this to the next level with Power View by offering business users an immersive experience for exploring and visualizing their data to gain insights. Bringing Analysis Services and Reporting Services together with PowerPivot and Power View, SQL Server 2012 offers a compelling BI platform and experience for both IT and business users. I believe this will help increase the reach of BI to a much larger user population.

3. BI tools are often thought of as Enterprise Solutions (tools for big corporations). How has Microsoft designed BI for small and mid-size businesses?

Thierry: Microsoft has focused this release on making access to insights available to an even larger set of business users no matter what level of sophistication and “technical savvy-ness” they have. This means that it reduces the need for IT to design and build datamarts, or Data models and develop reports on behalf of its users. IT can focus its resources on managing the corporate data sets, making them available, curated, secured, cleaned which is very often a large cost center that is very painful on small and Mid-size businesses. But we are taking our focus on small and mid-size business even further, by taking our Reporting Services assets and making them available as SQL Azure services. This means that small and mid-Size businesses do not need to invest in on premise software deployment to get access to the same powerful and sophisticated Reporting Services infrastructure large enterprises use. They can simply subscribe to get access to this service in SQL Azure.

4. What feedback are you hearing from SQL Server 2012 early adopters?

T.K.: The feedback on SQL Server 2012 has been great. We released the last Community Technology Preview (CTP3) in July and the Release Candidate (RC0) a couple of weeks back. We’ve been working closely with a lot of early adopters (customers, partners, MVPs) who have been using SQL Server 2012 to build new applications or improve their existing applications. The overwhelming feedback is that SQL Server 2012 is a game changer with features like AlwaysOn and Power View.

Thierry: The BI Semantic model is a big hit as it extends the ease of use and power of PowerPivot to IT scenarios on the server. IT now feels they can also reap the benefits of the PowerPivot technology (Vertipaq), but in a real professional environment and leveraging powerful servers. But the most surprising feedback we hear is about Power View. I am very excited about the enthusiasm I hear from our early adopter customers about the fun, slick and extremely intuitive user experience Power View provides. A good place to read more about these is from our blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlrsteamblog/archive/2011/11/17/what-s-new-in-power-view.aspx.

5. How will organizations be better equipped to leverage the Cloud through SQL Server 2012?

T.K.: Microsoft offers a symmetric data platform for on-premises and cloud with SQL Server 2012 and SQL Azure. This enables a lot of useful scenarios that will help customers move to the cloud. For example, you can use the SQL Server Data Tools and the Data-tier Application (DAC) Framework to develop apps once and deploy to SQL Server or SQL Azure. You can use SQL Server Management Studio to manage your SQL Servers as well as SQL Azure subscriptions. You can synchronize data between on-premises and cloud using SQL Azure DataSync. Business users can use PowerPivot and Power View to mash up and visualize data from SQL Server, SQL Azure and other sources.

Thierry: In this wave we are making Reporting services 2008 R2 functionality available as a service in the cloud with SQL Azure. But we are building the infrastructure in SQL 2012 to make SQL 2012 functionality available to the cloud within a few months of SQL 2012 RTM.

T.K.: Having these bridges between the cloud and on-premises is crucial for customers to take the leap and embrace the cloud.

6. Where do you see Microsoft SQL Server heading beyond the 2012 release?

Thierry: Data is becoming the new currency that determines which businesses succeed and prevail or fail. The demand for easy to use data exploration and presentation tools has never been stronger and everything suggests that it will keep increasing at an exponential rate. How do we allow a few hundred millions information workers to be able to gain insights from the data they have in order to optimize their business decision making in the same way they use simple productivity tools like Outlook, Excel or PowerPoint to send an email, manage a list of items or build a presentation? How do we enable IT to become more efficient at discovering and providing the much needed data their users need in an agile way, whether that data resides inside the corporate firewall or out in the cloud? These increasingly interesting questions are defining the constraints and expectations for the next generation of Business Insights experiences….

T.K.: As we put the wraps on SQL Server 2012, we’ll start planning for the next release wave. While it’s too early to comment on what will be in that release, a few things should be clear.

• Microsoft is making a huge bet on the cloud with Azure and Office 365 and that will strongly influence the direction of SQL Server. You can already see this with the updates to SQL Azure and upcoming release of SQL Azure Reporting.
• Customers are faced with ever increasing volumes of data and new types of data – real-time, unstructured, semi-structured, text, images, web logs, etc. The SQL Server data platform needs to evolve to meet these customer needs. The recent announcement of the SQL Server Hadoop Connector is an example of this.
• With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, more and more customers want their BI solutions delivered on mobile devices. At the PASS conference in October, we announced our Mobile BI roadmap. This is another area where you will see us making a lot of investment in.

We have a lot more up our sleeve, but you’ll have to wait to hear about them J.

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T.K. and Thierry already have us looking forward to the next release of SQL Server. In the meantime, the variety of new tools and features available in SQL Server 2012 make this release extremely exciting -not only for us techies, but also for business users looking to harness their data for better decision making.

A big thank you to T.K. and Thierry for taking time out of their busy pre-release schedules to share their thoughts!