SQL Server Kilimanjaro and Project Madison
Wikipedia says "Kilimanjaro with its three volcanic cones, Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira, is an inactive stratovolcano in north-eastern Tanzania rising 4,600 m (15,100 ft) from its base, and is additionally the highest peak in Africa at 5,895 meters (19,340 ft), providing a dramatic view of the surrounding plains."
But this week the BI Conference has kicked off with an amazing announcement! There will be a BI focused release of SQL Server codenamed Kilimanjaro which is expected H1 2010 with CTPs available within the next 12 months. Kilimanjaro is focused on "People Ready BI".
A key component of Kilimanjaro is "Project Gemini", this is all about self-service BI using Excel. The vision behind Gemini is to free IT resources by giving business intelligence analysis and reporting capabilities to the end-users without IT losing control.
At the same time we will be releasing "Project Madison", this is the integration of Datallegro which will offer you an easy scale out solution to support data warehouses of up to 100s of terabytes.
This is very exciting news and I will keep you up-to-date whenever I get more information about this release.
Check out the press release.
You can see the keynote here, it contains a nice demo about the possibilities already in SQL Server around 00:35:00, Project Madison around 01:10:00 and Project Gemini around 01:27:00. If you have time however look at the complete keynote!
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