High-availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) in SQL Server “Denali” Release

Lot of exciting information trickling out of Microsoft on the upcoming "Denali" release. One of the most promising enhancement I came across today is in the area of high-availability and disaster recovery - HADR.

The core conecpt behind this feature is something called as "availability groups". Availability groups essentailly are a set of failover partners (DBs), known as availability replicas. Each availability replica possesses a local copy of each of the databases in the availability group. One of these replicas, known as primary replica, maintains the primary copy of each database. The primary replica makes these databases, known as primary databases, available to users for read-write access. For each primary database, another availability replica, known as a secondary replica, maintains a failover copy of the database known as a secondary database. 
 
Following image helps explain the concept:

SQL Denali Availability Group

Here's a really good ste-by-step guide to configure HADR in Denali using Availability Groups: SQL Server Denali - AlwaysON (HADR): Step-by-Setup setup guide

I wonder if a SQL Azure instance is a supported secondary replica. Will post the result as soon as I get some time to try it out.

Cheers!!

SharePoint and BI : Better Together !!

I feel very motivated by the resposne to this morning's webinar that we did on the BI Capabilities of SharePoint. My intuition is starting to turn into a belief that data analysis and  management is going to gain significant momentum for two key reasons:

    1. Management Pressure: Upper and mid management will continue to be under pressure to show value by cutting cost and increasing efficiency. This in turn will put pressure on IT to evolve their BI strategy to include Self Service BI so as not to get bogged down by increase in demand. Self-service BI will be thier saviour as they will not be able to scale up by hiring more people because of continued cost pressure.

   2. To make sense out of the information explosion: Collaboration features in tools like SharePoint are resulting in an unprecedented level of information explosion. Organizations will be hard pressed to make sense out of all that informantion for multiple reasons, including;
                a. Legal Liability
                b. Getting Pulse of Employees Sentiments
                c. Knowledge Sharing
                d. Data Quality and Accuracy
                e. Many more.

  I believe, SharePoint is uniquely placed to capitalize on this opportunity. I cannot think of a better delivery engine for all this data analysis and mining capablities. I also cannot wait for Denali and Crescent to coem to market with thenext level of coolness.

Here are few slides that I came up with for today's event that maps various Self-Service state that organizations can choose to be in (depending upon their unique requirements), and components from Microsoft BI stack that can enable those requirements.  I have included only the delivery components in the stack, and therefore SSIS, SSAS and other underlying components are missing.
 
** If you need non-watermarked version of these images for non malicious purposes, just drop me a note and I will be glad to send a copy.

The BI Continuum

Capabilities Mapped to target BI Strategy options

Technology Enablers Mapped to Target BI States 

 ** If you need non-watermarked version of these images for non malicious purposes, just drop me a note and I will be glad to send a copy.

   I am tempted to add the coud-Azure dimension to the Microsoft BI story, but that's probably in another post.
Cheers!! 

Denali, Crescent - BISM and (future of) UDM !!

I got an early preview of Denali and Crescent couple of weeks ago. Many cool features in pipeline that I cannot yet talk about (NDA reasons), but be on a lookout for official communication trickling down from Microsoft as they near the CTP/release date.


I want to focus on BISM in this post as many people are wondering (especially those who earn their bread, butter and beer) by desinging, creating and maintainig UDM models. BISM stands for "Business Intelligence Semantic Model" and is a new data modelling language. Therefore, it obviously raises concerns in people's mind about the future of UDM. 


 I found this great post by T. K. Anand who is "Principal Group Program Manager" in SSAS team. He has done a god job in clearing the confusion about BISM and UDM, and how they compliment each other in his post titled Analysis Services – Roadmap for SQL Server "Denali" and Beyond.

I have bulleted out few key takeaways from the post:
    0.  Crescent is going to be Microsoft's flagship offering in the area of ad hoc reporting and data visualization experience.

   1. BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model) will become part of  Analysis Services and provide an alternative to UDM (OLAP) to power Crescent as well as other Microsoft BI front end experiences such as Excel, Reporting Services and SharePoint Insights to provide these capabilities.

   2. The BI Semantic Model is a relational (tables and relationships) model with BI artifacts such as hierarchies and KPIs. It unifies the capabilities of SMDL models with many of the sophisticated BI semantics from the UDM. However it does not replace the UDM.


  3. BISM and UDM are going to co-exist. BISM will incrementally enable  mroe and more "Self Service BI scenarios" ,where end users are able to do simple data analysis using PowerPivot, SharePoint, etc; On the other hand, UDM will continue to be the tool of choice for BI proffessional for IT managed enterprise scale BI projects.


 4.  UDM is a mature and industry leading technology and is here to stay. UDM (OLAP) models are not being deprecated.

 5. For BI applications that need the power of the multidimensional model and sophisticated calculation capabilities such as scoped assignments, the UDM is the way to go. For a broad majority of BI applications that don’t need that level of complexity, the BISM will offer a rich, high performance platform with faster time to solution. 

6. Last but not the least, Crescent current UI is all Silverlight. It will be interesting to see how the integration with Excel, SharePoint and other end user tool plays out.

Here is the new model diagram:


BI Semantic Model in Crescent

 In reality, Crescent fill a much needed gap that Microsoft had in the Self Service BI space. Crescent is just taking the story forward that was started by Microsoft's PowerPivot. It will be interesting to see how it plays out with existing players in this space ranging from old timers like SAP's BusinessObjects Explorer, IBM's Cognos Express and Information Builders' WebFocus Visual Discovery; and new companies like MicroStrategy, Tableau, Target and QlikTech.

I am just starting to play with some of the self service capabilities in Microsoft stack, and will look forward to posting what I learn in subsequent posts.
Cheers!!