Magenic Company Blog

Recently, at the PASS Business Analytics Conference, Microsoft announced their new strategy for Business Intelligence. They summed it up with a single word – Simplicity. This was an exciting announcement as Business Intelligence has long been the wild west of development and often utterly chaotic.

A good data warehouse is a core component of any organization’s BI infrastructure. It is used to create the cubes, reports and dashboards that deliver business value. For this reason, it is extremely important that any new data warehouse project is successfully executed, otherwise the rest of your BI infrastructure will be negatively affected.

Of course Magenic provides many services and products for many different businesses. As an example, Steve Hughes, Business Intelligence Project Lead for Magenic, took some time to share some elements of a recent project.

This past Thursday, Magenic hosted a Business Intelligence Summit in Chicago. We had some customers, partners, and consultants present on the role that business intelligence has in their worlds. It was great to see our customers talk about how their projects were implemented and how we overcame both business and technology challenges.

On July 16, 2012, Microsoft made the Office 2013 Preview publicly available. As I worked through the install and saw the hype, I was really curious about some of the enhancements made to the business intelligence (BI) capabilities in Excel. Keep in mind that Microsoft has continually added BI components to the Excel product. Agree or disagree, this means that they have been positioning Excel as an “already installed” BI client for everyone.

For technologists, SQL Server 2012 is a treasure trove of technical goodies. There are a number of blogs describing these technical features, including the Magenic BI blog. A quick review of these blogs makes it clear that Business Intelligence (aka BI) is a major focus of SQL Server’s latest result.

The long wait is now over, SQL 2012 has finally been released! No more Code Name Denali. No more CTP 0. The next question, though, is what do we do with it? I am sure just about all CTOs, CIOs, IT managers and directors have already started to ask why they should upgrade, migrate, develop on, or purchase SQL 2012.

After the SSDT product shipped, I spent some time converting an existing project ( dbproj / Data Dude based project) to SSDT. Actually, I decided not to convert the project, even though I was prompted to do so. Instead, I decided to re-import the SQL 2012 database. My reason to do so was the fact that the old project was breaking down each table into multiple files, one per object.

I recently viewed an excellent presentation on some of the new features in SQL Server 2012 Integration Services such as shared connection managers, parameters, undo/redo in the designer, and some visual changes as well. One of the most significant changes that really caught my attention is Integration Services’ new Project Deployment Model, specifically the Integration Services catalog.

This year at the 2012 PASS Summit I was introduced to the next generation of data appliances from Microsoft. As I looked at what they were offering, I concluded that they were making it easier to implement Microsoft’s business intelligence (MSBI) solutions.