Microsoft SQL Server: Faster Insights from Any Data

Microsoft SQL Server empowers BI users through easy-to-use self-service capabilities for Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint, while balancing the need to maintain credible, consistent data throughout the organization with robust data management capabilities. With Office and SharePoint 2013 and future releases, Microsoft Excel becomes a complete and powerful self-service BI tool. With the emergence of Big Data, it is all the more important to ensure that BI users are able to gain business insight from all available data, whether structured or unstructured. In this paper, we also discuss Microsoft capabilities for Big Data as an integral part of a BI platform for the modern enterprise.

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Microsoft SQL Server offers a balance of user-powered BI and data-management capabilities-both through self-service capabilities for end users in Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint, and by providing the tools to maintain credible, consistent data throughout the organization. With Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013, Excel 2013 becomes a complete and powerful tool for self-service BI.

With Power View and PowerPivot in Excel, Microsoft delivers powerful self-service reporting to any user through a user experience that is highly interactive and that offers data exploration, visualization and presentation capabilities. The new BI Semantic Model provides a single model for all end-user experiences, enabling organizations to scale from small, personal BI solutions to the largest organizational BI needs. Data Quality Services (DQS) enables organizations to create and maintain a knowledge base of data quality topics that improves data quality and eases data management - helping organizations to gain leverage from internal knowledge to profile, cleanse, and match data. Master Data Services (MDS) continues to make it easier to manage master data structures and offers new enhancements such as Entity Based Staging, updates to the Master Data Manager web application, and the new Master Data Service Add-in for Excel.

Lastly, Microsoft continues its ongoing commitment to Big Data analytics and data warehousing. The range of data warehouse offerings from Microsoft provides robust and scalable solutions for storing and analyzing data in a traditional environment. Now, Microsoft is embracing Apache Hadoop as part of its vision to provide business insight to all users from virtually any data.