Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

Integration Services.  A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the local PASS chapter meeting I went to and the talk about DTS.  One of the points was that they were going to change then name, and the new name is Integration Services.  This was announced during the opening keynote this morning as Bill Baker from Microsoft talked about the new BI (Business Intelligence) tools that are coming in SQL 2005.  The phrase you will hear them say a lot is: Integrate.  Analyze.  Report.  They already had Analysis Services in SQL 2005, and last year came out with Reporting Services, so that just left Integration Services to make it complete.  Regardless of what you call it, it's still pretty damn cool stuff that it does.  And Lance was just about drooling over the demo they did this morning of building a slow updating dimension (I think I got those words right).  He was also very excited about the new data viewers available in Integration Services.

Unfortunately, it appears that neither the PASS Board of Directors, nor Bill Baker read my web log.  Bill Baker had a slide that had printed on it something about eating their own dog food.  And Kevin Kline (no, not the actor) opened the function with a handful of thank yous and announcements.  And then gave a somewhat less than motivational talk about what it takes to motivate technical workers.  OK, I'll agree that the talk on motivation had some good points, but it's really hard to listen to someone talk about motivation who does not sound very motivated.  Kevin, here's a speaking tip:  If you're not excited, just talk a little faster and walk a little faster and it will trick most people into thinking that you are excited.  And yes, the thank-yous and recognition for all the volunteers are important, but really, let's start off a three day conference with a bang, somebody who is excited and will build excitement in the crowd.  Come back tomorrow and do all the announcements and thank-yous.  The volunteers will still be here, we'll all be more excited with a goo day of training under our belts, those who were rushing to be here up to the last second will be more relaxed.  It's a win-win-win opportunity.

By the way, if you ever have a talk with a manager or a client who questions whether SQL Server can really handle large enterprise solutions, first check this page at Microsoft's web site.  And second, you should have been here this morning to hear Bill Baker talk about an unnamed phone company that called Microsoft to talk to them about their 11 Terabyte OLAP cube that they built.  It was working fine, they were apparently just curious what the biggest cube was and what limits there might be.

And finally this morning in the keynote, they did a really cool demo of a new Report Builder tool for Reporting Services.  Based on a properly defined UDM, it autmatically recognizes aggregations and will automatically build drill-down reports for you.  It was pretty cool.  And this could honestly be a tool that power users could use to build reports without having to crack open Visual Studio which can be intimidating.

Overall, I'm pretty darn excited about the new features coming in SQL 2005.