So there were two sets of announcements just made during Ted Kummert keynote.

1. Project “Madison” – Share-nothing MPP scale-out version of SQL Server, powered by DATAllegro technology. We saw live demo of 24 instances running 150 TB data warehouse, returning queries into Reporting Services in seconds. This is great news, but everybody probably could predict that this is going to happen sooner or later after DATAllegro acquisition was announced. Well, it is sooner rather than later.

2. SQL Server “Kilimanjaro” to be released in first half of 2010, driven by project “Gemini” technology. This is the big big news I referred to earlier. While Ted in his presentation and Donald during the demo were focused on the Self-Service part of it, I want to put attention to the technology powering it. Just repeating what Ted and Donald said: This is Analysis Services using column-oriented and in-memory technologies running inside Excel (first demo) and in SharePoint (second demo). This is what allows loading of all these tens millions of rows into Excel and fully manipulating them in split seconds, building pivot table on the fly, infering data relationships etc etc. As Ted said, the work on this project has been ongoing for quite some time now, way before SQL 2008 shipped, and this is first public showing of the technology. Much more details coming during this session – don’t miss it tomorrow !

Update:

Some more coverage here:

Richard Tkachuk: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlcat/archive/2008/10/06/project-gemini-building-models-and-analysing-data-from-excel.aspx

Marco Russo: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2008/10/06/microsoft-bi-conference-2008-announcements-on-stage.aspx