Chris Webb’s Chalk Talk

I had the pleasure of attending a chalk talk hosted by Chris Webb at the MS BI Conference here in Seattle.  He spoke for a while about using MDX for KPI creation in Analysis Services 2005.  I hadn’t really thought about it, but I had previously used Business Scorecard Accelerator with Analysis Services 2000 and had some difficulty with calculating trends and status and he had great ideas for how to accomplish this.

I have a feeling we will be seeing a blog post soon.

Katmai release

I’m at the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle and Jeff Raikes announced the next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Katmai” will be out sometime next year.

This seems interesting to me since a lot of the customers that I know of are still using SQL 2000 and are working right now to migrate to 2005.  It will be interesting to see if customers are able to get migrated and then be willing to start over again by upgrading to a new version of SQL.

I suppose some will skip 2005 and go to Katmai anyways.

Jeff announced that among other things that Katmai will have support for storing unstructured data in the form of documents.  It will be interesting to see how this takes shape.

Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference

The registration is now open.  Thought I’d let you know.

http://www.microsoftbiconference.com/registration.aspx

Mark