Long time no blog!

I authored this month's (May 08') cover story on an interesting topic...Does SQL Server 2008 BI enhancements warrant an upgrade? It is quite the question and to be honest I dont think a 'one size fits all' reply would do the question justice AT ALL! For example, the scalability/performance enhancements found in the relational engine (ie Partioned Table Parallelism & Star Join Query Optimizations) are not applicable for a BI/SQL Server environment if the current cube processing/queries to the underlying schema are performing very well as is! If you do not perform any data profiling nor have any intention to than the new SSIS Data Profiling Task will obviously not be of much use to you or your client organization either! You could counter every new enhancement in the SQL Server 2008 BI stack with a reason why you do not need to upgrade...atleast as of today!

What do you think??? Is there ever such a thing as a 'gotta have' feature found in our beloved SQL Server product? In the context of BI I would say SQL Server 2005 defenitly brought about several close such features but even then (and now) folks are still running SQL Server 2000 based BI systems/environments just fine! So what do you think?

Cheers

Derek Comingore