SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence

Download as doc
Download as doc
You are on page 1of 16

SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence

White Paper

Published: August 2007


Updated: July 2008

Summary: SQL Server 2008 makes business intelligence available to


everyone through deep integration with Microsoft Office, providing the right
tool, to the right user, at the right price. Employees at all levels of an
organization can see and help to influence the performance of the business by
working with tools that are both easy to use and powerful. Integration with the
2007 Microsoft Office System enables users to view business performance in
a way that they are familiar with. The introduction of PerformancePoint®
Server 2007, helps customers gain actionable insight into the entire
organization so they can monitor, analyze, and plan their businesses, as well
as drive alignment, accountability, and actionable insight across the entire
organization.

For the latest information, see Microsoft SQL Server 2008.


Contents
Introduction.............................................................................................. ....................3
Microsoft Business Intelligence Technologies ........................................... ..............3
2007 Microsoft Office System Integration............................................ ....................4
Unifying Data Storage and Access..................................................... .........................5
Consolidating Corporate Data for Analysis and Reporting............................... ........5
Data Warehouse Performance.................................................... ............................7
Building and Managing Sophisticated BI Solutions.................................................. ....8
Developer Productivity........................................................................ .....................9
Manageability........................................................................................... ..............10
Enterprise Scalability..................................................................................... .........11
Extending the Reach of Your BI Solution........................................................ ...........12
Extending Business Insight to Everyone Through Familiar Tools..........................12
Empowering End Users Through Flexible Reporting........................ .....................13
Conclusion............................................................................................. ....................15

2
2
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.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Technologies


Microsoft provides a comprehensive Business Intelligence (BI) offering that is
based on a scalable data platform for data integration, data warehousing,
analysis, and reporting, including powerful and intuitive tools that end users
can use to access and analyze business information. At the core of the
Microsoft BI end-to-offering is Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008, a complete data
platform that enables you to:
Unify storage and access for all data across the enterprise.
Build and manage sophisticated BI solutions.
Increase the reach of your business intelligence solution to empower all employees.
The specific technologies of SQL Server 2008 that form the basis of this
powerful BI offering are described in the following table.

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

While SQL Server 2008 delivers a comprehensive BI platform, it is through


deep integration with productivity tools, such as the 2007 Microsoft Office
System, that you can empower employees throughout the enterprise to use
this platform and turn business insight into effective actions.

2007 Microsoft Office System Integration


The SQL Server 2008 BI platform reaches information workers through the
following 2007 Office System components:
Microsoft Office Excel. Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 is a powerful
spreadsheet application that you can use as an interface for OLAP analysis,
data mining, and report rendering. Through deep integration between SQL
Server 2008 and Excel 2007, you can:
Enhance the end user’s ability to access and analyze data from SQL Server 2008 Analysis
Services. With Excel 2007, end users can browse data that is stored in multidimensional
OLAP cubes in Analysis Services. Excel 2007 enables users to easily build Microsoft
PivotTable® dynamic views to “slice and dice” data any way they wish through the tools that
are already installed on most desktop computers.
Gain more value from your Excel implementation by using the tight integration between Excel
and Analysis Services that enables end users to easily use the Analysis Services features,
such as translations, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), calculated members, named sets,
and the server actions in Excel that turn Excel into an analytical client.
Make predictive analysis available to everyone and enable non-technical users to harness the
highly sophisticated data mining algorithms of SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services within the
familiar environment of Office. Designed with the end user in mind, Data Mining Add-Ins for
Office 2007 empowers end users to perform complex analysis directly in Excel and Microsoft
Office Visio®.
Add automatic analysis features, such as highlighting exceptions where data seems to differ
from patterns in other areas of the table or data range, forecasting future values based on
current trends, analyzing what-if scenarios, and determining what must change to meet a
specific goal.
Deliver reports in the format preferred by most end users by using the new and enhanced
Reporting Services Excel rendering capabilities, which enable end users to receive reports
directly in Excel.

Microsoft Office Word. Microsoft Word is a word processing application that


you can use as a format for reports. Use the new, highly requested report
renderer for Word, which enables you to render SQL Server 2008 Reporting
Services reports in Word format.
Microsoft Office Visio. Visio is a drawing and diagramming application that
you can use to annotate, enhance, and present your data mining graphical
views. With SQL Server 2008 and Visio 2007, you can:

4 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


4
Render decision trees, regression trees, cluster diagrams, and dependency nets.
Save data mining models as Visio documents embedded in other Office documents or saved
as a Web page.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. SharePoint® Server is comprehensive


collaboration, publishing, and dashboard solution that you can use to provide
one central location for placing all your enterprise-wide BI content and tools,
so that everyone in your organization can view and interact with relevant and
timely analytical views, reports, and KPIs. The integration of SQL Server 2008
Reporting Services with SharePoint Server 2007 enables you to:
Use one consistent user interface to manage and view reports.
Track versions and workflow of reports when they are stored in SharePoint Server 2007
document libraries.
Manage a single security model for reports through the SharePoint document library.
Use the SharePoint Server 2007 out-of-the-box Report Center template to easily build a site
to store reports.

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server. PerformancePoint® Server is an


integrated performance management application that employees can use to
monitor, analyze, and plan business activities based on the analytical data
provided by SQL Server 2008.
This white paper shows how SQL Server 2008 and its integration with the
2007 Office System can help you unify business intelligence data storage and
access, build and manage sophisticated BI solutions, and extend the reach of
those solutions to all of your employees.

Unifying Data Storage and Access


Most organizations have multiple business systems, each with its own
dedicated data store. Although you can often generate reports from individual
applications and perform analysis on the data they contain, you can only
achieve complete and consistent insight into the business by consolidating
disparate data throughout the enterprise to create a central source of
business data for reporting and analysis.

Consolidating Corporate Data for Analysis and Reporting


SQL Server 2008 supports two common approaches to unifying business data
for analysis and reporting:
Data warehouse. A data warehouse is a dedicated data store for enterprise-wide data, which
is populated and synchronized with business data from disparate data sources throughout the
enterprise. The key advantage of this approach is that you can design the data warehouse for
optimal analytical and reporting performance with no impact on the performance of the line-of-
business applications from which the data originates. Another advantage is that you can clean
and consolidate data that comes from multiple sources into a single consistent version of the
truth.

5 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


5
Data source abstraction. SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services enables the creation of data
source views to provide an abstraction layer over one or more data sources. You can then use
the data source view as a single source for Analysis Services, Integration Services, and
Reporting Services. With a data source view, the data is retrieved from the underlying source
systems when analysis occurs or a report is generated. This enables real-time analysis of the
data in your business applications. Additionally, the data source view through its added layer
of abstraction can be used to create friendly names to replace long or cryptic table names.

These approaches are shown in the following illustration. With SQL


Server 2008, you can use either one or a combination of the two.

Work with All of Your Data the Way You Want to


Regardless of which approach you take to unify your business data, SQL
Server 2008 builds on its strong legacy of support for both relational and non-
relational data by providing data types that enable developers and
administrators to efficiently store and manage unstructured data such as
documents and images, so you can store, manage, and analyze data in the
format that best suits your business.
SQL Server 2008 includes enhanced support for XML data storage as well as
a FILESTREAM data type that enables large binary data to be stored in the
file system yet remain an integral part of the database with transactional
consistency. Additionally, restrictions on the size of user-defined data types
have been removed, which makes it possible to exceed the 8-KB limit imposed
in earlier releases of SQL Server. Support for spatial and location data types
makes it possible to store and analyze geographical data that conforms to
industry standards.

6 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


6
Integrate All Enterprise Data Sources
SQL Server 2008 data source views enable integration of data and access to
data that originates from heterogeneous enterprise-wide data stores, such as
SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and Teradata. These views also provide an OLAP
store of enterprise scale; the breadth of support for diverse data sources in
SQL Server Integration Services means that you can extract data from all
kinds of existing business applications. Therefore, unifying the data in all of
your enterprise data sources is easy to accomplish, regardless of whether you
want to build an abstraction layer through a data source view or use an ETL
process to synchronize a dedicated data warehouse for analysis and
reporting.
Additionally, through support for Web services and the Microsoft .NET
Framework, SQL Server 2008 supports interoperability with multiple platforms,
applications, and programming languages, so you can maximize your
investment in new and existing systems by integrating and connecting your
disparate data sources. Support for existing and emerging open standards,
such as HTTP, XML, SOAP, XQuery, and XSD, further facilitate
communication across your extended enterprise systems.

Data Warehouse Performance


SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive and scalable data warehouse
platform that enables your organization to integrate data into the data
warehouse faster so you can scale and manage growing volumes of data and
users.

Optimize ETL Processes


Data warehouses are usually populated and updated with data from source
systems through an ETL process. After the initial load of data into the data
warehouse, periodic refreshes of new and changed data from the source
systems are performed to ensure that the data warehouse is up-to-date.
SQL Server Integration Services provides a comprehensive platform that you
can use to extract data from diverse source systems, make any required
transformations to the data or its structure and format, and then load the
transformed data into the data warehouse. Performing lookups to match
records from source systems to existing records in the data warehouse is a
common operation in ETL processes, and in SQL Server 2008 the
performance of lookups has been significantly improved so that these
operations scale to extremely large tables.
To help track data changes and ensure data warehouse consistency, SQL
Server 2008 introduces change data capture functionality to log updates in
change tables, which makes it easy to identify rows that have been modified
and to determine the details of the modification and its cause.

7 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


7
Manage Hardware Resources Efficiently
Through support for data compression, SQL Server 2008 enables you to store
your data more effectively and reduce storage costs. In addition, the
compression significantly improves performance for large input/output bound
workloads. SQL Server 2008 also provides native support out-of-the-box for
backup compression. Additionally, the VARDECIMAL data type and new
sparse columns in SQL Server 2008 help you get the most efficiency from your
disk storage resources by reducing the amount of space that is required for
the large tables that contain the predominantly numeric or NULL values that
are often found in data warehouses.
In addition to efficiencies in data storage, SQL Server 2008 supports dynamic
allocation of Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) mapped memory that
supports up to 64 gigabytes of memory with Windows Server® 2003,
Datacenter Edition, and 2 terabytes with the 64-bit edition, to support large
data warehouse environments.
SQL Server 2008 also introduces Resource Governor, which enables
administrators to define resource limits and priorities for different workloads,
so that concurrent workloads can provide consistent performance and make it
possible to manage resource contention issues proactively.

Optimize Database Performance


SQL Server 2008 includes a high-performance relational database engine that
enables you to build highly effective data warehouse solutions. Innovations,
such as query optimizations for star schemas and tools to help you tune
indexes and data structures, make SQL Server a natural choice for a heavily
queried data warehouse. With the introduction of the MERGE Transact-SQL
statement in SQL Server 2008, developers can more effectively handle
common data warehousing scenarios, such as checking whether a row exists
and then executing inserts or updates. Additionally, an extension to the
GROUP BY clause enables users to define multiple grouping in the same
query. Grouping Sets produce a single result set that is equivalent to a UNION
ALL of differently grouped rows, which makes aggregation querying and
reporting easier and faster.
SQL Server 2008 supports partitioned tables to help you optimize the
performance and management of large tables, and with new support for
partitioned table parallelism, you can significantly optimize a data warehouse
by using partitioned tables.

Building and Managing Sophisticated BI Solutions


As organizations demand ever increasingly complex analytics, the need to be
able to build and deliver effective BI solutions quickly and to reduce the
management overhead of your BI infrastructure has become a major
consideration. SQL Server 2008 includes innovative tools that increase
developer productivity and manageability, which enables faster capitalization

8 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


8
on new analysis and reporting capabilities while incurring reduced
administrative overhead.

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.

Use a Rich, Modern Programming Environment.


Through tight interoperability with Microsoft Visual Studio®, developers can
easily build and maintain robust, secure, scalable BI applications. SQL Server
Business Intelligence Development Studio offers a single tool that covers
multiple types of BI solution and provides a single, consistent environment for
developing ETL, analysis and reporting solutions. Intuitive BI wizards that are
delivered as part of the Business Intelligence Development Studio make it
easy for even novice developers to build advanced Business Intelligence
models and projects.
By embedding the common language runtime (CLR) in the database engine,
SQL Server 2008 enables developers to choose from a variety of languages to
develop applications, including Transact-SQL, Microsoft Visual Basic®, and
C#®. This flexible environment enables developers to use their existing skills
to efficiently develop database applications.
When integrated with Visual Studio, the development experience across all of
the SQL Server 2008 BI technologies is optimized for providing a true
application development environment that supports the full project
development life cycle (develop, test, deploy, modify, and test).

Implement Best Practice Solutions


Enabling developers to build solutions more quickly is only effective if those
solutions are optimally designed. To help ensure the best possible
performance and correct functionality, SQL Server 2008 includes the following
development environment features that promote best practices and help
developers create effective analysis solutions:
A consistent development environment for all BI solutions, including Analysis Services, OLAP,
and data mining applications.
Built-in support for the full development lifecycle, including design, build, debug, and deploy
operations; and support for team-based development through integrated support for source
control.
A number of intuitive designers and wizards that make it easy to create Analysis Services
solutions quickly.
An attribute relationship designer that includes built-in validations to help in creating optimal
dimension designs.

9 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


9
A dimension editor that has been slimmed down to provide better productivity and the
presence of parent child relationships is automatically detected.
A cube designer that has been streamlined and improved to provide better detection and
classification of attributes along with identification of member properties.
Aggregation of individual partitions, which enables you to optimize measures from different
periods or areas.
The aggregation designer has a new algorithm to help create initial aggregations. The
aggregation designer is optimized to work with usage driven aggregations. You can now look
at the aggregations that have been created and add to those aggregations or remove them.
Intelligent support is provided to help with merging existing and new aggregation designs.

Additionally, SQL Server 2008 provides AMO warnings to alert developers


when their design breaks one of over 40 best practices. These warnings are
integrated into real-time designer checks, and provide a non-intrusive way for
developers to detect potential problems with their design.

Increase Reporting Flexibility


Reporting is a significant element of any BI solution, and business users are
demanding increasingly complex reports. SQL Server Reporting Services
provides the following features to make it easy to build reporting solutions:
A Visual Studio-based report development interface in Business Intelligence Development
Studio that developers can use to build, debug, and deploy reports.
A business-focused report development tool named Report Builder that business users can
use to create and deploy reports.
A wide range of data display structures, including tables, matrices, lists, and charts.

Additionally, SQL Server 2008 includes extensive enhancements to Reporting


Services that improve reporting performance and provide increased flexibility
for formatting and publishing reports. One of the enhancements made to
Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 is support for a new layout structure
that combines table and matrix data regions into a new Tablix data region.
Tablix enables developers to generate reports that combine fixed and dynamic
rows. Previously, layouts of this kind had to be developed by using multiple
matrix data regions and shrinking row headers. Support for Tablix data regions
simplifies the inclusion of combined static and dynamic data in reports, and
extends the formatting and layout capabilities of Reporting Services
significantly.

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.

10 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


10
Use a Single, Unified Tool
SQL Server 2008 provides DBAs with SQL Server Management Studio; a
single, unified management tool that provides integrated management of
Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Integration Services, and multiple
versions of SQL Server, from the same interface for increased DBA
productivity, flexibility, and manageability across extended SQL Server
implementations.

Monitor Data Warehouse Resources


SQL Server 2008 includes performance data collection and warehousing,
which enables monitoring and reporting of resources across your data
services solution.

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.

11 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


11
Write-back to MOLAP. Analysis Services 2008 removes the requirement to query ROLAP
partitions when performing write-backs, which results in huge performance gains.
Scale-out Analysis Services. A single read-only copy of an Analysis Services database can
be shared between many Analysis Servers through a virtual IP address. This creates a highly
scalable deployment option for an Analysis Services solution.
Execution plan persistence. SQL Server 2008 provides functionality to lock down query
plans so that, to the maximum extent possible for correctness, the query plans survive server
restart, server upgrade, and production deployments. This ensures consistent optimal
performance of queries against SQL Server data.

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.

Extending the Reach of Your BI Solution


In the past, BI solutions were used by a small group of business analysts.
Now, more and more organizations are realizing the benefits of extending the
insights that are available through BI to all employees and embedding those
insights into the day-to-day operations of the business.
SQL Server 2008 enables you to create a BI solution that can scale to
thousands of users and deliver a rich user experience to everyone through an
extensible, open, and embeddable architecture that is optimized for
interoperability with Microsoft Office.

Extending Business Insight to Everyone Through Familiar


Tools
Microsoft Office is a ubiquitous productivity suite that most information
workers in organizations throughout the world use to perform their daily tasks.
Through close integration with Office, SQL Server 2008 enables you to

12 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


12
empower your employees with critical, timely business information that is
tailored to their specific information needs.
Tight integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office System and PerformancePoint
Server 2007 enables organizations to save time and money by using
technology that works well together. The integration also provides a quicker
return on investment in terms of end-user scale by delivering business insight
to everyone through familiar tools that are already installed on every desktop
computer.

Extend Your Reporting Solution with Microsoft Office


Reporting Services 2008 supports rendering to both Excel and Word formats.
Rendered reports are fully editable in the appropriate Office application, which
extends your reporting solution so that users can create custom documents
based on business reports.

Use Excel for Analysis


Excel is the tool of choice for many financial and business analysis tasks. By
combining Excel with SQL Server Analysis Services, you can bring the full
power of your OLAP solution to business users through PivotTable dynamic
views and Microsoft PivotChart® dynamic views in an Excel spreadsheet.
You can use the SQL Server Data Mining Add-Ins for Excel 2007 to enable
business analysts and executives to go through the entire life cycle of a data
mining project, including preparing data, building, evaluating, and managing
mining models, and predicting results by using either spreadsheet data or
external data that is accessible through your Analysis Services database.

Publish Business Insights Throughout the Enterprise


SQL Server 2008 integrates tightly with SharePoint Services to make it easy
to publish and manage reports centrally in a SharePoint site and to build user-
specific dashboards that provide customizable views of relevant reports.
Additionally, PerformancePoint Server provides a central interface for data
analysis that is built on SQL Server Analysis Services and enables customers
to monitor, analyze, and plan their business, as well as drives alignment and
provides actionable insight across the entire organization.

Empowering End Users Through Flexible Reporting


SQL Server 2008 provides a number of reporting enhancements that enable
you to quickly and easily generate the reports that your organization needs, in
the format that you want, and in a layout that makes sense of the data they
contain.

Create Ad Hoc Reports with Report Builder


Report Builder has been enhanced extensively in SQL Server 2008 to enable
users to easily build ad hoc reports with any structure. The intuitive design

13 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


13
interface makes it easy for non-developers to create business documents,
such as purchase orders, invoices, and contracts, based on report data.

Include Richly Formatted Data


Rich formatting can make business documents and reports more intuitive and
significantly easier to understand. The rich text component of SQL
Server 2008 enables mixed-formatting text boxes and importing of marked up
text strings, and supports the new chart formats and the Tablix data region so
that users can generate reports with high standards of visual design to convey
business information clearly and logically.

Benefit from Increased Responsiveness


As reports become more central to the way organizations distribute business
information, ensuring the highest levels of performance and scalability of your
reporting solution has become more critical. The Reporting Services engine in
SQL Server 2008 has been significantly re-engineered to resolve current
limitations, and now includes on-demand processing and instance-based
rendering to provide the best possible reporting performance.

Deploy Reports Securely Over the Internet


SQL Server 2008 enables you to extend the reach of your Reporting Services
solution to external users, such as customers and suppliers, by publishing
reports securely over the Internet.

14 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


14
Conclusion
SQL Server 2008 builds on the strong momentum in the business intelligence
market by providing a scalable infrastructure that enables information
technology to drive business intelligence throughout your organization and
deliver intelligence where users want it. SQL Server 2008 makes great strides
in data warehousing by providing a comprehensive and scalable platform that
enables organizations to integrate data into the data warehouse faster and to
scale and manage the data while delivering insight to all users. With the more
scalable business intelligence infrastructure provided by SQL Server 2008,
reports and analysis of any size or complexity can easily be managed, and at
the same time empower users through the deeper integration with Microsoft
Office. SQL Server 2008 also delivers improved performance in many areas,
including data warehousing, reporting, and analytics.
For more information:
Microsoft SQL Server on Microsoft.com
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/
SQL Server Development Center
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/sqlserver
SQL Server TechCenter
http://technet.microsoft.com/sqlserver

15 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence


15
Please give us your feedback:
Did this paper help you? Tell us on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent), how
would you rate this paper and why have you given it this rating? For example:
Are you giving it a high rating because it has good examples, excellent screenshots, clear
writing, or another reason?
Are you giving it a low rating because it has poor examples, fuzzy screenshots, unclear
writing?

This feedback will help us improve the quality of white papers we release.
Send feedback.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of
publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of
Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
This white paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
DOCUMENT.
Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document
may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.
Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this
document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any
license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.
© 2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, PowerShell, SharePoint, SQL Server, Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Server, and the Server Identity Logo
are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.
All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

You might also like