SQL Server Magazine UPDATE, July 18, 2002

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(below COMMENTARY)

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July 18, 2002—In this issue:

1. COMMENTARY

2. SQL SERVER NEWS AND VIEWS

3. READER CHALLENGE

4. ANNOUNCEMENTS

5. HOT RELEASES (ADVERTISEMENTS)

6. RESOURCES

7. NEW AND IMPROVED

8. CONTACT US

1. COMMENTARY

(contributed by Brian Moran, news editor, [email protected])

Would you and others in your company like to make better decisions faster? Would your company like to capitalize on information assets to thrive in a competitive marketplace? The Microsoft SQL Server Accelerator for Business Intelligence (BI), a free tool that helps you quickly get BI solutions in production, might be just the ticket for your company.

Microsoft released the SQL Server Accelerator for BI about 2 months ago. I encourage you to peruse the information available at the SQL Server Accelerator for BI home page. In particular, the fast-fact data sheet provides a short but comprehensive introduction to the product.

Microsoft designed Accelerator for BI to help customers get real-world, production BI solutions to market faster. Think of Accelerator as a rapid application development (RAD) tool for BI. In designing the tool, Microsoft has determined that BI solutions must include business-level domain knowledge in addition to supporting technical data. This philosophy is 100 percent accurate. You can't create decision-support systems unless you understand the decisions and analysis you're trying to influence.

Microsoft attempted to make Accelerator for BI more than "just another tool for techies" by including reasonable real-world data models and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for two business scenarios. The Retail Analytics model provides data models and KPIs that support analysis of topics such as sales, sales representative performance, fraud detection, store performance, and marketing campaigns. The Sales and Marketing model supports analysis of topics such as orders and backlogs, sales and shipments, returns by customer type, sales force performance, and marketing campaigns. These two models cover a tiny percentage of real-world BI needs, so Microsoft ensured that third-party providers could add models. Also, you can use the existing models as templates to build custom solutions.

Accelerator for BI represents a combination of business-model knowledge, data-warehousing best practices summarized in a prescriptive architecture guide, and a series of technical components that you access through the Analytics Builder Workbook. The workbook is a Microsoft Excel-based tool that lets you capture metadata and business data to describe a data mart for a particular business scenario. The Analytics Builder Workbook provides much of the infrastructure plumbing you need to build a production-quality data warehouse, including a staging database, relational star schema, an OLAP cube, Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages designed to move data through the pipeline, and a set of preconfigured client views of the data.

Microsoft is a plumbing company. Many of its most successful initiatives are platforms that provide the plumbing and infrastructure customers and third-party vendors need to build solutions quickly and inexpensively. Businesses have struggled—more than Microsoft anticipated—to build high-quality BI solutions, and this difficulty has slowed Microsoft's vision of "BI for the masses." Simply put, BI for the masses will never be reality until customers can easily, quickly, and inexpensively build production-quality data warehouses based on business analysis needs. Accelerator for BI is a handy tool, but don't be mistaken: the tool doesn't let BI novices with zero experience build robust solutions. Accelerator makes delivering projects quicker and easier for skilled BI professionals.

By the way, the prescriptive architecture guides included with Accelerator provide great value as standalone guides. They encapsulate a wealth of BI best-practices information, and you should read the guide even if you don't plan to use Accelerator in your next BI project.

Accelerator for BI is available for free download, although you must run it on SQL Server Enterprise Edition. To find the download, go to the SQL Server Accelerator for BI Partner Overview page at http://www.microsoft.com/solutions/BI/partners/overview.asp and click the "Register to download the SQL Server Accelerator for BI" option You need to log on with a Microsoft .NET Passport account, then the interface will take you through the process of registering your intent to apply as an Accelerator partner. There's no cost to apply, and you don't have to become a partner. But following these steps is the only way I know to download the software for free.

Why the obscure route? Accelerator is a power tool for skilled users. Power saws are great tools in the hands of skilled users but can cut off the hand of a careless and untrained user. Accelerator won't cut off your hand if you don't use it properly. But users with no BI skills might not get the results they want, and they might conclude that the tool is useless. Microsoft hopes to avoid that scenario by driving tool usage through a trained partner community. However, you can download the software and legally use it even if you're not a partner. Just don't get mad at Microsoft if you accidentally cut off your hand.

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2. SQL SERVER NEWS AND VIEWS

Cesar Cerrudo and Mark Litchfield of Next Generation Security Software discovered multiple vulnerabilities in SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) 2000, the most severe of which can lead to remote compromise of the vulnerable server. Microsoft has released Security Bulletin MS02-034 (Cumulative Patch for SQL Server) to address these vulnerabilities and recommends that affected users download and apply the appropriate patch mentioned in the bulletin. These patches are cumulative and address all previously discovered vulnerabilities in the affected product.
http://www.secadministrator.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=25868

(contributed by Paul Thurrott, [email protected])

Speaking recently at Oracle's semiannual analyst day, CEO Larry Ellison uttered words many people never thought they'd hear: Oracle will adopt many of the strategies that made arch-enemy Microsoft successful and will focus on inexpensive, integrated software suites. "The suites always win," Ellison said. "The specialty guys can never survive for long." Later this year, Oracle will release a set of products, including the Oracle Collaboration Suite (OCS) that will compete with core Microsoft infrastructure software such as Microsoft Exchange Server.

As usual, the volatile Ellison spent much of his time good-naturedly poking fun at Microsoft; Ellison's company has long been the number-two software maker behind Microsoft. "Bill [Gates is] a genius," Ellison joked. "We don't need him working here. We just read what he says: It's cheaper." Ellison said that the Oracle Collaboration Suite will integrate with Microsoft Outlook and let users store email, voicemail, documents, and group calendars in an Oracle database. The software will be more secure and less expensive than Microsoft's solutions, he said.

The Oracle Collaboration Suite will contain a bit of technology I've been wondering about recently—the Internet File System (iFS) software that Oracle announced more than 2 years ago. As you might recall, iFS was going to enable "no-OS" hardware that would run only on Oracle's database, making Windows unnecessary. And if Microsoft's plans to move SQL Server 2003 (code-named Yukon) into the Windows file system sounds suspiciously similar to iFS, remember that Microsoft has been working on this plan (once called Storage+) for years; indeed, database file systems have been part of the holy grail of computing for decades. In the Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle customers might finally see the fulfillment of the iFS vision. "It took us a long time to get the pieces together," Ellison said, "so we think we've gone down the road to solve all these problems. It was not easy."

Oracle's desktop play mirrors moves by other server companies such as Sun Microsystems, which recently released a new version of its StarOffice office productivity suite to good reviews. Interestingly, as Oracle and Sun tentatively reach into the desktop market for growth, Microsoft is moving upscale with more scalable server products and services.

The voting has closed in SQL Server Magazine's nonscientific Instant Poll for the question, "Are you using MSDE?" Here are the results (+/- 1 percent) from the 343 votes: