TechED North America 2011 is in full swing this week and we’re excited to share some of the Business Intelligence capabilities coming in the upcoming release of SQL Server Code Name “Denali.”

Just over a year ago we released an exciting innovation in the Business Intelligence space – PowerPivot for Excel 2010.  The feedback has been great so far.  Rita Sallam from Gartner said "[PowerPivot] will spread like wildfire. As organizations upgrade to Office 2010, Excel users will adopt PowerPivot, whether the [IT staff] likes it or not."  This is just one of the reasons why a recent Gartner report recognized Microsoft as a Leader in Business Intelligence based on “Ability to Execute” and “Completion of Vision.”  PowerPivot was also chosen as one of the Top 10 Products of 2010 by eWeek.  Most importantly, many of you have shared stories about and applications that you have built on PowerPivot that are helping users of all skill levels get the information they need, when they need it, and more importantly on their terms.

We are excited to share some of the new BI capabilities coming in the next version of SQL Server. Whether you are an end user, seasoned BI developer or even new to BI, you will certainly enjoy the new set of features we are planning to ship, including:

Rapid Data Exploration & Visualization

  • SQL Server Denali will introduce Project “Crescent” - an Interactive Data Exploration and Visualization tool to help you discover and share insights across all levels of the organization.
  • A major update to the award winning PowerPivot add-in for Excel.

    

 

Scalable & Managed Self-Service BI

  • New capabilities in SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) with its new BI Sematic Model that will scale from small personal BI solutions to large organizational BI needs. Find out more about the BI Semantic Model here.
  • Business Intelligence IT dashboards and controls that will help manage the analytics your end users create while allowing IT to monitor and govern end user activity, data source usage, and performance metrics from servers.

Credible, Consistent Data

  • Major updates to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) that can help reduce time-to-solution for innovative, team-based data integration across data sources to deliver credible, consistent data reliably and efficiently.
  • Introduction of SQL Server Data Quality Services to help improve data quality by using organizational knowledge and 3rd party reference data providers to reliably profile, cleanse, and match data - as a standalone service or by leveraging SSIS.

Complete data warehouse solutions

  • Lower data warehouse costs with reference architectures and appliances designed to offer the best price performance and the lowest price per terabyte
    Support for up to 256 cores – enabling high-performance for very large workloads or consolidation scenarios.
  • Ability to scale to 100s of TBs while maintaining high performance through massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture with SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse.

Let us know what you think and stay tuned for future notifications and releases – including the next SQL Server Code Name “Denali” Community Technology Preview.  For more information visit www.microsoft.com/sqlserver!