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!!