I'm just back at the hotel here in Seattle, so just some time for a quick post about day 1 of the

So here we are in Seattle at the BI conference.  Day 1 and it's been great to catch up with

It was nice to start the day drinking Starbucks in Seattle. It has that feeling of authenticity about

Mosha,

I attended Amir’s session today and really liked what I saw so far; I would really love to see this marriage between the Excel and Analysis Services happen.

Whoever setup a YTD or PY calculation with an Excel Dashboard that holds all data and BI logic in Excel knows complicate that can be with Excel offset and lookup formulas, and who knows MDX knows that a simple YDT() or PARALLELPERIOD() will do the job.

However, one thing I am not sure about is the capability to dynamically link my Excel model to a Gemini model. Let’s assume I want to convert my existing, Excel solution into Gemini, but still keep part of my BI logic in Excel, still using the powerful Excel formulas I am familiar with, but want to leverage the smart BI stuff of Analysis Services, to do the part of the BI logic that’s so painful in Excel (like YTD or PY calculation) with the Gemini model. I would expect that I can dynamically link the BI logic of my Excel sheets. But as far as I understood it today this is not possible with upcoming Gemini release, or is it possible?

Thanks,

Andreas

Thanks Mosha for posting the video link. I must say the demo is impressive in how Microsoft is thinking about the BI solution stack going end-to-end from data warehouse to Excel and to a web-based view for general interaction.

As someone who is in the "open source BI land", I must confess that I am a fan of some of the Microsoft's BI technologies - namely Analysis Services and SQL Server. Yes, I have reservations around Reporting Services, or embedding BI into MS Office products like Word, or about bloating a solution with SharePoint and PerformancePoint - but as a common denominator, SQL Server and Analysis Services do provide the best price-performance today for a BI backend solution IMHO.

One of the challenges we constantly face as BI solution providers is to call out what is the most common interface for the BI user. In their demo, Ted Kummer and Donald Farmer are right to point out that if left to their own devices, most people trying to do a data analysis will bust out Excel. Solution providers like me don't like this fact for several reasons (a lot of them may be valid) and try to guide our users towards a purely web-based interface to do their analysis. The biggest rationale for this is to avoid various versions of Excel files floating around with multiple copies of data and custom calculations (with no QA) -- and so we like to control by having all BI users access data from a centralized web interface, which is reporting data from a centralized repository -- and that way, we know that users will be guaranteed a "single version of truth", and they will be happy.

Is that true though?

In my own open source BI project OpenI, one of the most used feature turns out to be "export to Excel", so try as we may, there are valid reasons to cater towards a BI user's natural flow of analyzing data, and let them get their data into Excel.

And in that sense, Microsoft's approach may have its merit in looking at Excel as the piece in the front and center for self service BI. Of course, calling it "democratization" maybe far fetched because this democracy will only be true in the Microsoft Office world, but it is a pretty big world of BI users. And for those who would like to stay far away from the Microsoft Office world, there needs to be equally compelling alternate solutions (open source or not).

If not anything, this thinking from Microsoft is worth for all BI practitioners to consider -- and see the demo. We may not agree with the exact tools used, but the use case, or the scenario, of a knowledge worker finding the data/information they need, analyzing it in an intuitive fashion, and publishing it for their peers to see -- that's a key part of what we're all trying to solve. And unless we make it utterly easy and painless, we still have a long way to go.

The conference is over, and I am back home. Of course unlike some other folks who will spend 11 hours

For the past year and a half I've been working in the SQL Server Analysis Services team. This week, we

It was nice to start the day drinking Starbucks in Seattle. It has that feeling of authenticity about

In memory cube - nice .It will improve performance of MDX.

How about scalability?

Wouldn't it be a fantasy to expect Gemini with MDX  that does parallel query execution by 2010?

So, although later than the trail blazers , I thought I'd write up a brief note about the day one

Welcome to installation #118 of Log Buffer , the weekly review of database blogs. Today, we’re gonna

Mosha,

A couple of questions regarding programmability of Gemini.

- Will it be possible use standard / C++ / ODBO and ADOMD.NET to source data?

- Will there be open modeling APIs available?

Thanks,

Andreas

>>It will be possible to use ODBO and/or ADOMD.NET to query Gemini models hosted inside Analysis Services.

OK, what about a local Gemini model, the one that runs on my laptop and is not yet uploaded to SharePoint / Analysis Services? Will I be able to query the model using ODBO and/or ADOMD.NET, similar to what the Gemini PivotTable does? What API is the Gemini PivotTable we saw in the demo using?

Thanks,

Andreas

Ik zat net even wat achterstallige blog feeds te lezen, met name over de Microsoft BI Conference van

There is interesting news coming out of Microsoft’s TechReady event about a new research project called

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During the day, whenever I could I hung out in the SQL Server Business Intelligence world (another main