Intelligent Enterprise

You heard about Microsoft's Kilimanjaro and Madison projects last year, but these code names are going away now that the company is getting closer to releasing new versions of Microsoft SQL Server. Microsoft announced today that a community technical preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available this month that will include in-memory analysis capabilities. It also announced what will be called the Parallel Data Warehouse edition of SQL Server, which is set to debut in the first half of next year. But perhaps the biggest surprise is that IBM will be a hardware partner on Microsoft's Fast Track Data Warehouse reference configurations and the coming data warehouse edition.

First let's detail the news everyone expected. The "November CTP," as it's called, will let people try out two new in-memory analysis capabilities:

• PowerPivot for Excel is an add-in, in-memory BI engine that will enable desktop users to analyze up to millions of rows of data with rapid, multidimensional analysis. Speed and data capacity are reportedly limited only by the available processing power and memory of the hardware. The add-in will let you tap SQL data and do mashups with data from third-party providers, Web sources, external databases and so on so you can find new, interesting and potentially valuable correlations and relationships.

• PowerPivot for SharePoint lets users upload PowerPivot-driven analyses to SharePoint to ease collaboration with control. Analysis Services comes into play in ensuring user security over shared workbooks. Admins have control over data refresh rates and a dashboard shows them which analyses are being used by whom and how often.

The downside here is that both of these PowerPivot capabilities are designed for the latest editions of Microsoft software; PowerPivot for Excel works only with Excel 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint works only with SharePoint 2010.

The other expected element was the Parallel Data Warehouse edition, which is based on technology Microsoft acquired with DATAllegro. This separate product is NOT a part of the November CTP. Rather, it's said to be in "private CTP." Like R2 it's expected to be released in the first half of 2010.

The surprise news is that Microsoft has added IBM to its list of hardware partners. That list was previously limited to HP, Dell and Bull, but IBM and EMC have been added for both the Fast Track Data Warehouse reference configurations and the coming Parallel Data Warehouse Edition.

Microsoft described customer choice as the motivation behind the IBM partnership, but one can guess that both companies have their eyes on Oracle. Oracle's pending Sun acquisition (which includes MySQL) gives both rivals good reason to work together. Microsoft will be using IBM's X series and Intel processors.

With R2 and the November CTP, Microsoft is also previewing new master data management functionality, stream processing capabilities and datacenter capabilities designed for high-scale deployments with up to 256 logical processors. You'll find more detail here.

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