Microsoft SQL Server

Why Microsoft BI?

Microsoft business intelligence is delivered through a trusted and familiar environment that solves the business needs of organizations of all sizes around the world. Powered by the flexibility and horsepower of Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft business intelligence solutions provide value to all users across your organization.

Total cost of ownership issues are at the top of everyone’s list today, and business intelligence investments are no exception. And while every project starts with the ultimate vision of connecting everyone on every desktop and every mobile device, the software, training, maintenance and upgrade costs add up quickly. But a Microsoft business intelligence project delivers unparalleled economic value.

You can leverage your existing investments in SQL Server and Office SharePoint Server 2007 to extend out the capabilities and add new functionality and new users. With a solution based upon Microsoft technologies, a pervasive “business intelligence for everyone” reality is closer than you might think.

How Does Microsoft BI Work?

An effective, integrated business intelligence solution can improve business performance by driving better decision making across your organization. But for a business intelligence solution to live up to its promise, it must be designed with the needs of every user in mind and must have the flexibility to accommodate all the structured and unstructured information your organization uses day to day.

The foundation of a solid business intelligence solution is the very data that people rely on to make decisions. SQL Server can bring together all your data, wherever it resides. Known for its power and scalability, SQL Server offers an enterprise-ready engine that can store massive amounts of data and support high query loads and clustering.

More value!

In this economic climate, Microsoft offers the best return on your Data Warehouse investments. Take advantage of a comprehensive Data Warehouse and BI platform in SQL Server.  SQL Server 2008 ships with a world class relational database, Analysis Services and Integration Services.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) provides a scalable enterprise data integration platform with exceptional Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and integration capabilities, enabling organizations to more easily manage data from a wide array of data sources. Use Integration Services to implement the ETL operations that are required to build a data warehouse. SSIS provides:

• The World’s fastest ETL tool
• Connectivity to non-SQL Server, data sources e.g. Oracle, Teradata, DB2 mainframe, and ERP Systems using OLE DB, and ADO.NET data sources (including ODBC for .NET)
• Easily integrate service oriented architectures and other nonstandard data sources by using the built-in support for XML and Web Services data
• A scalable pipeline architecture that provides a multi-threaded 64 bit platform to transform your growing data volumes in narrower batch windows
• A large number of built-in transformations to consolidate data from numerous systems, reduce data duplication, and clean dirty data.
• Integration of large volumes of data through lookups on large tables, such as customer dimensions
• Use change data capture to identify operational changes without requiring expensive batch processing

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 helps enable organizations to build comprehensive, enterprise-scale analytic solutions that deliver actionable insights through familiar tools. Rely on SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to scale demanding analytical applications with millions of records and thousands of users.

• Take advantage of the improved Aggregation Designer to optimize Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) performance and eliminate unnecessary a
• Scale out Analysis Services by sharing one read-only Analysis Services database between several Analysis Services servers
• Aggregations with block computation
• Add global scalability to your solutions and give all users access to localized analytical data in their native language with powerful translation capabilities and automatic currency conversions
• Enable the combination of real-time updates with MOLAP class performance with Proactive Caching
• Use Proactive Caching to provide superb query performance and isolate data source systems from the load of analytical queries
• Optimize backup performance easily by taking advantage of a scalable backup solution that offers performance comparable to that of a file copy operation