SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence
SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence
SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence
White Paper
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Introduction
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, businesses are realizing that they
can only succeed by proactively identifying market trends and opportunities,
and by responding rapidly to new customer demands. Additionally, employees
must prioritize business activities and expenditure to ensure the most efficient
use of the available resources and make effective business decisions.
To meet these challenges, employees need to gain actionable insight into the
business so that they can make intelligent, informed decisions and contribute
to business success. Organizations want to embed this insight into everyday
business activities so that all employees are engaged, either explicitly or
implicitly, in acting on the results of analysis of a complete and consistent
version of all enterprise data.
Component Description
SQL Server Database Engine A scalable, high-performance data storage engine for
extremely large volumes of data making it an ideal choice
for consolidating business data from across the enterprise
into a central data warehouse for analysis and reporting
SQL Server Integration Services A comprehensive platform for extract, transform, and load
(ETL) operations that enables the population and
synchronization of your data warehouse with data from the
disparate data sources that are used by your business
applications throughout the organization
SQL Server Analysis Services Provides an analytical engine for Online Analytical
Processing (OLAP) solutions, including business measure
aggregation over multiple dimensions and key
performance indicators (KPIs), and for data mining
solutions that use specialized algorithms to identify
patterns, trends, and associations in business data
Component Description
SQL Server Reporting Services An extensive reporting solution that makes it easy to
create, publish, and distribute detailed business reports
both within the enterprise and outside the enterprise
Developer Productivity
SQL Server 2008 simplifies the development of business intelligence
solutions. BI developers benefit from easy-to-use utilities and tools that
increase control and automate routine, time-consuming tasks, and can use the
productivity features of SQL Server 2008 to create effective analysis and
reporting solutions more quickly than ever; so your organization can take
advantage of them sooner.
Manageability
Through innovations such as a unified management tool, enhanced self-tuning
capabilities, and a powerful management programming model, SQL
Server 2008 extends the SQL Server ease-of-use leadership and increases
the productivity of database administrators (DBAs). These enhancements
enable DBAs to focus on high value tasks, like database architecture, while
spending less time on routine maintenance, configuration, and tuning.
Enterprise Scalability
A key factor related to the successful delivery of truly sophisticated BI
solutions requires sustained developer productivity and manageability even
through large-scale implementations. Furthermore, the infrastructure must
provide performance-related scalability, which in SQL Server 2008 has
achieved a wide variety of investments that are focused on ensuring this
enterprise-scale sustainability even through the largest scale of BI
implementation.
Scalable Analytics
The premise of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is that instant access to
accurate information enables end users to answer even the most complex
questions at the speed of thought. Thus, the aim to continuously excel in
providing even faster query times and data refresh rates is a priority during the
development process of any SQL Server Analysis Services release, an aim
that naturally also has been driving the release of SQL Server 2008 Analysis
Services.
SQL Server 2008 includes Analysis Services that enable you to drive broader
analysis with enhanced capabilities, including complex computations and
aggregations. Analysis Service provides enterprise-scale performance
through:
A flexible caching model. With Analysis Services, you can control how data and
aggregations are cached to optimize query performance while maintaining an acceptable level
of latency between the cache and its underlying data store.
Declarative attribute relationships. In an Analysis Services dimension, you can explicitly
declare relationships between attributes in a hierarchy. This enables Analysis Services to pre-
generate aggregations when a cube or dimension is processed, which improves runtime query
performance.
Block computation. Block computation eliminates unnecessary aggregation calculations (for
example, when the values to be aggregated are NULL) and provides a significant
improvement in analysis cube performance, which enables users to increase the depth of their
hierarchies and complexity of computations.
Scalable Reporting
For many organizations, getting the right information to the right people at the
right time is a significant challenge. SQL Server 2008 provides a high-
performance reporting engine for processing and formatting reports along with
a complete set of tools for creating, managing, and viewing reports. An
extensible architecture and open interfaces enable easy integration of
reporting solutions in diverse IT environments.
You can generate reports from multiple diverse data sources, including
SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle, without first building a centralized data
warehouse. You can deliver reports throughout the organization both internally
and externally through the simple deployment and configuration capabilities
that are provided by Reporting Services. This enables users to easily create
and share reports of any size or complexity. You can also deliver reports to
customers and suppliers easily by deploying reports over the Internet.
Reporting Service provides support and the ability to control server behavior
with memory management, infrastructure consolidation, and straightforward
configuration through a centralized store and an API for all configuration
settings.
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