The second CTP (Community Technology Preview) build of the forthcoming SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 was released today. Besides bug fixes, SP2 includes major BI features and enhancements including:
Reporting Services
- SharePoint 2007 integration – this one is a true enzilla (enhancement Godzilla) and deserves a separate post. Suffice to say that unlike the previous Explorer and Viewer webparts, SP2 will allow you to move the report catalog to SharePoint to enable publishing, viewing, and managing SSRS 2005 reports within SharePoint 2007.
- Report Builder support for Oracle 9.2.0.3 or above (previously only SQL Server and Analysis Services 2005 were supported for Report Builder models)
- New .NET Data Provider for Hyperion 9.3 BI+ Essbase Enterprise Analytics
- Select All option has been restored with multi-valued parameters (it was disabled in SP1 for performance reasons).
Analysis Services
- Better Excel 2007 integration – advanced filtering, cube formulas, offline cubes.
- Data mining add-ins for Excel 2007 -- Table Analysis Tools for Excel, Data Mining Client for Excel, Data Mining Templates for Visio
- Performance improvements with subselects, arbitrary shapes, running sum calculations, visual totals, ROLAP dimensions, cell writeback, many-to-many dimensions, 64-bit NUMA hardware, semi-additive measures and unary operators.
- Supportability enhancements – enhanced memory dumps, filtered dumps, best practices analyzer
More information about what's new in SQL Server 2005 SP2 CTP2 is available in the readme file.