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Many of the lessons learned from Project REAL are applicable to SQL Server 2008. We are currently working on Project REAL | Practices which will be ready by June 2009.
Project REAL is a cooperative effort between Microsoft and a number of technology partners in the business intelligence (BI) industry to build on actual customer scenarios to discover best practices for creating BI applications based on SQL Server 2005. The term REAL in Project REAL is an acronym for Reference implementation, End-to-end, At scale, and Lots of users. Find out which partners are participating in Project REAL.
Project REAL uses authentic customer data to work through customer deployment issues and to address the full range of real-world challenges that companies face when analyzing large data sets. These challenges include:
Design of schemas—both relational and multidimensional
Implementation of data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes
Design and deployment of client front-end systems, both for reporting and for interactive analysis
Sizing of systems for production
Management and maintenance of systems on an ongoing basis, including incremental updates to the data
The Project REAL reference implementation provides you with a working sample to build, implement and test the solution in your organization. The sample schemas, code, and architecture can be used to jumpstart the development of your own Business Intelligence solution. It contains a subset of the Project REAL data so you can see how various parts of the system work with actual data.
The kit contains:
A set of instructions for setting up the environment
Guidance on how to explore the implementation
A sample relational data warehouse database (a subset of the Project REAL data warehouse)
A sample source database (from which we pull incremental updates)
SSIS packages that implement the ETL operations
An SSAS cube definition and scripts for processing the cube from the sample warehouse
Sample SSRS reports
Sample data mining models for predicting out-of-stock conditions in stores
Sample client views in briefing books for the Proclarity and Panorama BI front-end tools
This kit will guide you through the key points to observe in the Project REAL implementation. Use it to learn and to get ideas for your own implementation. (While we believe it represents a very good design and generally follows best practices, it should not be regarded as the solution for every BI situation.) It will be helpful to have seen overview presentations about the BI tools in SQL Server, or read documentation, before exploring the kit. One good source of information is to go through the tutorials that ship with SQL Server (the tutorials are installed when you select “Workstation components, Books Online and development tools” at installation time).
Download the kit from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=68222. There will be two installer files (.MSI files) – one for the sample code and tools, and one for the data. Each installs in just a few minutes. Then open the “Reference Implementation Guide” document and start exploring!
The Project REAL team has provided content to help explain the parameters of the project. The following is a list of the documents available for Project REAL:
Read an introduction to the Project REAL system, its data models, subsystems, and deployment scenarios. This paper is the first in a series that explores various aspects of Project REAL and the best practices that it has revealed.
Get a detailed technical discussion of designs and best practices for Analysis Services that were developed in Project REAL. This paper describes each of the different types of objects, such as data sources, data source views, dimensions, hierarchies, attributes, measure groups, and partitions in detail.
Download this white paper to understand ETL design decisions that were made for each scenario and implementation detail of the Project REAL effort for SQL Server 2005 Integration Services at Barnes & Noble.
Learn about the Migration Wizard, a fast and effective tool for moving your existing cubes to Analysis Services 2005.
Download this white paper to get a detailed discussion on how partitioning was implemented in Project REAL, both on the relational data warehouse and in the Analysis Services cubes.
Discover an approach for building retail out-of-stock predictive models using SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services. When applied to Project REAL data, these models produced very accurate predictions.
This paper describes the system and network instrumentation and monitoring used for Project REAL, focusing on the tools used, their installation and configuration, and the lessons learned.
This article contains step-by-step instructions for creating a Web page load test, and sample code and instructions for creating a unit test. Also, instructions are provided for setting up the load test that you use to specify load patterns.
This paper describes best practices for hardware optimization for a multi-terabyte SQL Server 2005 data warehouse and cube. It describes hardware testing and tuning exercises conducted with large-scale Analysis Services cubes.
Listen to members of the Project REAL team through webcasts that target different levels of users. The following is a list of the webcasts available for Project REAL:
The Project REAL Technology Series highlights a live demo from Project REAL using a robust 2TB data warehouse. Each session is an in-depth dive where you can ask questions of the experts from Microsoft, Unisys, and other BI partners. Search for Project REAL events coming to a location near you.
