Last week I participated in Microsoft's BI conference in Ra'anana, Israel. After the conference I asked myself: What have I really learned today? Well, here is what I remember:
- Microsoft figured out that the eternal BI tool is and will be Excel. People just love their Excel sheets and they will stay there. This is why the mission is to bring the BI into their Excel sheets. Their new product - Excel Services, will manage our excel sheets in one central place which is connected to our Analysis Services cubes.
- In my point of view, SQL Server 2008 is just a bunch of many performance issues and it is not really a new product. There are a lot of new "performance features". For example, most of our MDX queries will run faster, especially those who has null cells. The new Cell-By-Cell calculations performance improvements will cause these queries to run faster. I think that SS2008 could be one big Service Pack. If I'm wrong, please do comment me.
- SQL Server 2005 has many products that we don't know good enough. Some products that I need to learn about are: Replication, SQL Server Agent, SQL CLR and more. I do know what they do and even played with them a little bit, but I want to know how they can help me and improve my work.
- Many new features in SS2008 come from two old sources: BIDS Helper (SSAS open source addin) and of-course, Oracle...
- My big wish - IntelliSense for Analysis Services will not be in SSAS2008 and maybe won't be at all. This is because the guessing is MDX is very hard. There are too many options in every statement you write.
- We won't need to upgrade to Office 2007 in order to use Excel Services. Only the developers will need it.
This is what I remember for now. I'll update this post if something new will come around in my mind.