United States   Change   |   All Microsoft Sites

Home

Microsoft Home  |  Servers and Tools

Business Intelligence

SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence

Overview

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 provides a scalable Business Intelligence platform optimized for data integration, reporting, and analysis, enabling organizations to deliver intelligence where users want it.

Top New Features

  • Create high-performance Analysis Services solutions with optimized cube designers, subspace computation, and MOLAP-enabled writeback capabilities

  • Implement enterprise-scale Reporting Services solutions through new on-demand processing and instance-based rendering

  • Build flexible and effective reports with the new Tablix data structure and rich formatting capabilities

  • Expand reach, and empower more users through optimized integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system

Predictive Analysis

Predictive Analysis

Unified Dimension Model (UDM)

Unified Dimension Model (UDM)

Integrate and manage all data

Use the enterprise-scale data warehouse platform of SQL Server 2008 to efficiently implement and manage unified storage for all of your business data.

 

Boost data warehouse performance

  • Integrate large volumes of data into your data warehouse faster by using SQL Server 2008 Integration Services, and consolidate real-time data by capturing data changes

  • Increase the manageability and performance of large tables with partitioning, which enables you to manage growing volumes of data and users of your SQL Server 2008 data warehouse more efficiently

Consolidate all data for optimized reporting and analysis

  • Work with all of your data and interact the way you want through support for both relational and non-relational data, including new data types such as FILESTREAM & Spatial

  • Incorporate data from multiple sources directly into a single report

  • Use the data source view to integrate data from across the enterprise and create a Unified Dimension Model that consolidates data from heterogeneous, enterprise-wide data stores, such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP and Teradata, to create a holistic view of your business, helping end users gain enterprise-wide insight

Related Links

Deep Dive

Business Intelligence Development Studio

Business Intelligence Development Studio.

Reach all users with a comprehensive platform

Use intuitive wizards and innovative tools for building integration, reporting, and analytic solutions within a single environment.

Realize increased developer productivity and design comprehensive BI solutions by using rich feature sets, scaling all the way from reporting to multidimensional as well as predictive analysis, and enjoy faster capitalization on new reporting and analysis capabilities.

Increase developer productivity

  • Use the rich visual development environment provided by SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio, which supports the entire development life cycle of developing, testing, and deploying robust, secure, scalable solutions

  • Implement best practice analysis applications through automatic notifications about potential issues in your design throughout the entire Analysis Services development process

  • Optimize OLAP performance with the innovative new Aggregation Designer

Reduce management overhead

  • Focus on high-value tasks while spending less time on routine maintenance and tuning operations, by using the unified management tool to provide an integrated management experience across all SQL Server technologies for increased productivity, flexibility, and manageability

Realize the power of high performance

  • Build highly responsive reporting solutions with on-demand processing and instance based rendering by using SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services to take your enterprise reporting to new levels of performance and scale

  • Drive broader analysis with the extensive analytical capabilities provided by SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

  • Use intuitive cube design tools and enhanced dimension designers to streamline the development of your analysis infrastructure and build robust, high performing solutions

  • Take advantage of subspace computations to significantly improve analysis cube performance, which enables users to increase the depth of hierarchies and the complexity of computations

  • Implement high-performance "what if" scenarios with support for write-back to MOLAP, which offers significantly better performance than the traditional ROLAP-based write-back solution

Related Links

Deep Dive

Data Mining Add-ins

Data Mining Add-ins

Report Builder 2.0

Report Builder 2.0

New Charting Capabilities

New Charting Capabilities

Deliver actionable insights to every user

Deliver a rich user experience to everyone through an extensible, open, and embeddable architecture that is optimized for Microsoft Office interoperability.

Empower end users

  • Enable business users to build ad hoc reports and create reports with any structure by using the powerful Report Builder 2.0 authoring tool

  • Increase report flexibility by combining fixed and dynamic rows by using the new Tablix report design template that enables data presentation scenarios that have previously been difficult or impossible to build

  • Incorporate rich formatting in reports to increase usability

  • Extend business insight through familiar tools. Save time and money by leveraging the tight integration between the SQL Server 2008 BI platform and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Render reports directly to Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Word

  • Make predictive analysis accessible to a wide audience by empowering end users to harness the highly sophisticated data mining algorithms of Analysis Services within the familiar environment of Excel by using the Data Mining Add-Ins

Extend reporting reach

  • Publish and manage reports centrally on the Web with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and build user-specific dashboards that provide customizable views of relevant reports

  • Use Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 to enable employees to monitor, analyze, and plan business activities as well as to drive alignment and actionable insight across the entire organization

Related Links

Deep Dive

Enabling business insights for better, faster, and more relevant decisions

As part of the Microsoft BI Solution, SQL Server 2008 provides a comprehensive Business Intelligence Platform that includes best of breed data integration capabilities through SQL Server Integration Services; reporting capabilities through SQL Server Reporting Services and Multidimensional OLAP capabilities through SQL Server Analysis Services.

Learn more about how the SQL Server Business Intelligence platform enable the Microsoft BI Solution.

Related Links

Additional Resources

Related Sites

Partners

Whitepapers

Events

 

Take the next step

Try it
Try SQL Server 2008

Buy SQL Server

Take a closer look

Solutions for your needs

Download the Essential Backpack
TechNet IT Pros Start Here
MSDN Developers Start Here