Today, one of my SQL Server Magazine articles went live and its topic was an interesting one…‘Is SQL Server 2008 BI worth an upgrade?’ I have had the great pleasure of working in a large variety of IT environments over the years and one trend I’ve noticed becoming more prevalent is organizations implementing Microsoft SQL Server just for Business Intelligence. By no means am I implying that SQL Server is not a great OLTP (relational database engine) as well. The facts though are that Microsoft has invested (and continues to invest) a great amount of resources into its overall platform’s BI capabilities. Some of you may have heard the informal nickname for SQL Server 2005, ‘the BI release’. These investments reflect the current status of corporate IT environments which are increasingly adopting|implementing more Business Intelligence based systems.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 continues the trend of improving its BI capabilities. Every major BI component (including the relational engine) has been enhanced in terms of both performance (scalability) and capabilities (features). Two other items I want to mention quickly (neither of which are in the corresponding article) is that of Change Data Capture (CDC) and Resource Governor (RG). CDC is a great feature for enabling your SQL Server 2008 based OLTP systems (yes, you would have to upgrade your OLTP servers) to expose their changed data asynchronously for ETL consuming purposes! In addition, RG can be used to prioritize OTLP workloads including that of ETL processes, this makes it easier to ensure that BI requirements do not adversely affect the more important OLTP-based applications (business transactional systems). So the big question still remains…is SQL Server 2008 BI worth the cost (and effort) of an upgrade? Unfortunately, like most difficult questions in life the answer is that it depends upon your unique business intelligence environment and requirements!

Cheers

Derek Comingore