Microsoft "Bulldog" (MDM)

Details are just coming to light regarding Microsoft's entry into the world of Master Data Management through their acquisition of Atlanta-based Stratature several months ago.  The product will be released to coincide with the next release of Office (Office 13), and will install as part of SharePoint.  According to the Bulldog product roadmap, the dev team is working with many Microsoft products such as PPS, Dynamics, SharePoint, Excel and more to integrate the master data hub with those products.  The stated goal is to have Bulldog remain almost identical to the Stratature +EDM product, with several enhancements aimed at improving the experience.

There is now a full product page at Microsoft, and Kirk Haseldon has updated his blog with some of the new details.  From his blog, it sounds like the planning has turned to development, and we should start to see something tangible in February 2008 for TAP program members and other early adopters.

One exciting aspect of the product is hierarchy management within an enterprise.  Taken directly from the product roadmap, here are some of the hierarchy scenario's that Bulldog will handle:

Master data contains a wide variety of hierarchies. The roll‐up hierarchies for accounts in a chart of accounts, the reporting hierarchy for employees, the organizational structure of a customer’s business, and categories of items in an item master are typical examples of hierarchies. These hierarchies are often hard coded into business systems or defined in a number of Excel spreadsheets. Hierarchies can be defined by attribute relationships: for example, city belongs to state and state belongs to region. These derived hierarchy relationships change whenever an attribute value changes. Hierarchies can also be defined as parent‐child relationships that may have an arbitrary depth along any path (ragged). The Stratature solution allows both types of hierarchies to be leveraged into a new derived hierarchy. The advantage of reuse is that it ensures that there is only one definition of the relationship at any point in time.

There is also extensive support for Business rules, workflow, flexible data models, etc.

Microsoft Performance Point Server 2007 finally RTM's

After years of hard work and a ProClarity acquisition later, Performance Point Server 2007 has finally been released.  More details here on the product home page.  Here are links to trial downloads and SDK.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Version (x86)

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Version (x64)

Deployment Guide, Operations Guide, Whitepapers

Planning Server, Business rules development guide and Monitoring SDK

Slick New MDX Editor/Debugger

This is a very nice looking tool for anyone that works with MDX.  It is currently in "CTP 1, version 0.1 Alpha" release, which is another way to say "Very early in development cycle".  It works with SSAS in all of its various versions from 7.0 to 2008.  Details and download here.

Documenting a SQL Server 2005 Solution end to end

I had heard of this tool before, and it looks interesting if you ever need to document a full SQL Server 2005 solution.  It apparently documents SSIS, SQL and SSAS as well as SSRS.  The output shows data lineage, as well as the structure of your database.  Worth a look, pretty affordable too.  Too bad they couldn't make a version that worked as an add-on to Data Dude.  Here is the link to their homepage.

Load Testing SQL Server Analysis Services 2005

Have you ever had a need to load test SSAS and then report on the results?  Your life just got easier.  There is now a project on CodePlex for that very purpose.  Apparently MCS and other large internal projects have used it for a while, but it is now publicly available as a community project.  Download it here.

Taking the pulse of SQL Server

If you have ever been involved in a big SQL Server project, you might have wanted some easy way to figure out how things are performing on the server.  Fortunately, many other people have wanted to do the same.  There are several ways available now (and more to come in SQL 08, specifically for SSAS I believe).  You can use the SQL Server Health and History Tool (SQL H2) which tells you all kinds of interesting things about the internals of SQL and run reports against it.

The other new and cool thing that has come out is an actual data mart that is built on top of the man Dynamic Management Views (DMV) inside SQL Server.  The DMV's are what drive the reports inside SSMS, and you can use them to find out all kinds of things.  Now you no longer have to run them manually.  Thanks to the SQL Server Customer Advisory Best Practices Team, now you can just install SQL DMVStats Data Warehouse on your server and your good to go.

Here are the main features as listed on CodePlex:

• DMV data collection
• DMV data warehouse repository
• Analysis and reporting.

VSTE for DB Pros (Data Dude) Power Tools released

If you are using VSTE for DB Pros, you will probably want to pick up the newly released Power Tools (didn't they used to call these sorts of things "Power Toys"?).  It adds a lot to the product in the way of convenience with the dependency viewer (you don't have to pretend to rename something to see dependencies now), additional refactoring abilities, enhanced data generation and T-SQL code analysis among other things.  Download it here.

Read more about it at Gert Drapers' blog, including detailed explanations and screen shots.

Here's the list of new features, copied from Gert's blog:

• Dependency Viewer
• Refactoring
  • Move Schema
  • Expand Wildcard
  • Fully Quality Name
  • Refactor in to strongly typed DataSet definitions
  • Refactor Command Generator
• Data Generation
  • Sequential Data Bound Generator
  • Editors for the Data Bound Generator, Sequential Data Bound Generator and RegEx String Generator to make configuration easier
  • The RegEx editor also tries to interpret your CHECK CONSTRAINTs and create a matching RegEx expression that you can use to generate data values that match the constraint definition
  • The RegEx editor can also be used for interactively defining and testing RegEx expressions and evaluate the output visually, which makes it a lot easier to create the right RegEx expression for your value domain.
• MSBuild Tasks
  • SqlSchemaCompareTask; allows you to compare schemas between two database from the command line using MSBuild.
  • SqlDataCompareTask; allows you to compare the content of tables within two databases from the command line using MSBuild.
• T-SQL Static Code Analysis
•  Miscellaneous tools
  • SQL script pre-processor command-line utility, which will expand all SQLCMD includes and variable definitions (sqlspp.exe)
• Schema Manager API