Interesting news from PDC: Microsoft has announced two new services – Pinpoint and Dallas.

You can find Pinpoint here: http://pinpoint.microsoft.com

Here’s the blurb from the site:

Pinpoint is the fast, easy way for business customers to find experts, applications, and professional services to meet their specific business needs—and build on the software they already have.

At the same time, Pinpoint helps developers and technology service providers quickly and easily get software applications and professional services to market—and engage customers who need what they offer.

Pinpoint is the largest directory of qualified IT companies and their software solutions built on Microsoft technologies.

• More than 7,000 software application offerings.
• More than 30,000 Microsoft-technology experts.
• The largest, most diverse set of Microsoft business platform offerings in the industry in a central location.
• Direct links between applications and the services that support them.

Whether you’re searching for expert help or offering it, Pinpoint helps you easily find and engage the right people and technologies to get the job done.

Much, much more interesting from a BI point of view is Dallas, which is part of Pinpoint: http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/Dallas

It’s Microsoft’s marketplace for data, all built on Azure. Again from the blurb:
Microsoft Codename “Dallas” is Microsoft’s Information Services business, enabling developers and information workers to instantly find, purchase, and manage Web services and datasets to power the next set of killer applications on any platform.

The Register has the best write-up of what this is here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/17/microsoft_dallas_data_service/

From that article:
Dave Campbell, a Microsoft technical fellow, demonstrated Dallas at PDC. He showed a list of data provides from the partners such as infoUSA, subscriptions, the ability to store structured and unstructured data, and to explore the data without needing to parse it, to preview the data in ATOM, invoke the data as a Rest service and analyze the data using PowerPivot in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program.

Note my emphasis on the last sentence! Here at last is the ability to buy that third party data that’s been a part of every Powerpivot demo. I’ve worked with a lot of companies that sell data in my career, and this looks like it could be a very significant development for them. I’d even heard vague rumours that MS were interested in buying commercial data providers at one point, several years ago – if they were prepared to go this extreme then it would certainly go a long way to making this strategy a success.

Now just think how cool it would be if SSAS or PowerPivot could be hosted on the cloud, so all you needed was Excel to analyse this data. Maybe one day…

Some notes/thoughts while I’m listening to John Welch’s session here at PASS on “SQL Server BI in the Cloud”. The room is packed… full marks to John for picking such a hot topic to speak on!

• Summary of reasons why the cloud is interesting for BI – easy scaling, setup, sizing etc.
• Distinction between ‘virtualised’ and ‘hosted’ services.
• Virtualised = pay on usage, instant scale, reduced scaling concerns
• Hosted = buy a set capacity
• Azure – making the point that, unlike most other cloud offerings, you can leverage your existing (SQL Server) skills
• Notes that other parts of the BI stack, apart from the relational engine, have been promised for the future. My feeling is that when/if SSAS in the cloud appears, it’s more likely to be PowerPivot in the cloud; note also that SSRS in the cloud has kind of already appeared with Access Services.
• BI scenarios not really considered so far by the Azure team. I echo John’s response of “Why???”
• Description of the Azure architecture. I was talking to someone last night about the way Azure requires use of SQL authentication (which MS have discouraged us from using for years!); SSAS of course only supports Windows authentication, which would be a problem for SSAS in the cloud, so I wonder if in the future we’ll get username/password authentication for SSAS?
• Limitations of Azure: 10Gb max data, query limit of 5 minutes, insert/update slow. Though for some, smaller, short-lived BI solutions Azure is a perfectly good solution; sharding is an option too.
• Shows SSRS (locally) working against data from Azure. Works better in CTP2 but still occasional bug.
• Before the presentation started I asked John if he’d tried using SSAS in ROLAP mode against Azure; he said he had and it worked, but it was v. slow (as you’d expect).
• Using SSAS in MOLAP mode, since processing queries are v. slow and there’s a query timeout of 5 mins, you need to create lots of small partitions  to ensure processing queries finish as quickly as possible. Proactive caching can’t use automatic notifications.
• SSIS out of the box support coming in R2. At the moment, SSIS doesn’t support bulk insert operations to ADO.Net destinations. 

I was just reading through a list of questions and answers about the new, more SQL Server-like SDS, on the SDS team blog and had a thought. Here’s three points that are made in the post:

When? or to quote JamieT “When do I get to party on this new service”?

We’re on track to deliver a public CTP mid-calendar year 2009 and ship in the second half of calendar year 2009.

The blog entry states “If it works with SQL Server, it will largely work with SQL Data Services.”. That word “largely” bothers me a little – it suggests the functionality is going to be reduced slightly. Details please?

We will be providing documentation soon on what is and is not supported in SDS. I’ll post an entry to the blog once the guidance is available and you can also keep an eye out for it on our MSDN Dev Center. But, to answer the question – We say *largely* due to the fact that there are things that just don’t apply in a cloud based world like setting the location of a data or log file or making server wide configuration changes. In v1 we expect to deliver a surface area that will support the vast majority of SQL Server database applications.

Will you offer hosted SSIS/SSAS/SSRS?

It’s on the product roadmap, but I can’t comment on specifics or timing.

So, we’ll get a CTP in a few months, it’s going to be mostly compatible with existing SQL Server apps, but we’re not going to get Analysis Services in the cloud just yet. What can we do while we’re waiting for cloud-based SSAS then? Well…

• It seems highly likely that we’ll be able to hook a normal, server-based instance of SSAS up to SDS and use it as a data source for building cubes. It would be a pretty silly thing to do though, I’m sure, because it would take ages to process a cube, but…
• Wouldn’t that make ROLAP a more attractive option as a storage mode? No processing needed then, just SQL queries generated whenever the data is needed. However, ROLAP is slow now and is likely to be even slower when you’re querying SDS, but…
• For some OLAP apps, you could dispense with a server-based instance of SSAS altogether. One little-known (and little-used) feature of SSAS is the ability to build ROLAP local cubes. As you probably know, a local cube (.cub file) is a portable cube that doesn’t need full Analysis Services installed anywhere. Since storing a local cube file somewhere in the cloud would be dead easy, I can imagine a scenario where you create a ROLAP local cube file – which would be no bigger than a few KB in size – allow people to download it, and then when they connect to their cube from Excel or wherever the local cube would then in turn retrieve the data it needs from SDS. Not exactly SSAS in the cloud, and probably only likely to work for small amounts of data and simple queries, but it’s an approach and not unlike what CubeSlice has been offering for a few years.
• With local cubes you could always convert them to MOLAP storage if you wanted faster query performance (at the expense of having longer processing times) and of course local cubes seem to be an important part of the Gemini story too. What we’d really need are easier ways to create local cubes and support for easy switching of storage modes (from ROLAP to MOLAP/Gemini) to make this as smooth as possible.

After all the rumours, here's the official announcement of the new relational features that are coming to SQL Data Services:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/archive/2009/03/10/9469228.aspx

Given that the team have already made noises about adding BI features to SDS soon, I can't wait to see what form they'll take. Of course there are already lots of ways of doing BI with data stored online as my last blog entry showed; there are also couple of startups like Birst and GoodData who do very sophisticated BI things in the cloud already. But I hope Microsoft has something up its sleeve, and that I can run an MDX query against it...