I started the day by attending the Donald Farmer and Daniel Yu's session "Creating the Right Cubes for Microsoft Excel and Excel Services" hoping that I'll get a sneak preview of Excel 2010. Alas, it was all about refining the cube definition with display folders, perspectives, hierarchies, etc. so it appears more user-friendly in Excel. Later, I learned that Office 2010 (or whatever it will be called) is under strict NDA which explains the lack of demos. The most interesting thing about that session was that I finally understood why the SSAS team decided to scale down the cube wizard in SSAS 2008 to generate basic dimensions only. The reason was performance. You see, the BIDS 2005 cube wizard would oftentimes suggest non-optimal dimension hierarchies and the modeler wouldn't revise the design leading to bad performance.

Next, I attended the Thierry D'Hers Top Ten Reasons for Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services. It's always good to watch RS-related sessions. Thierry listed the community support as one of the reasons for organizations to consider moving to SSRS. I agree with this and the great community support is applicable to all MS technologies. Speaking about BI only, a few years ago there wasn't a single book about Cognos for example. Granted, the last I look on Amazon there was one book. In comparison, Microsoft has a vibrant community of book authors, MVPs, trainers, etc. Almost every publisher has a book about SSRS 2008. This is of course good for the community and so good about authors as the competition is tough J

Thierry listed the Report Builder 2.0 as #1 reason to move to SSRS 2008, followed by data visualization, and tablix. Based on my real-life projects, I'd personally have listed them in the reverse order, with tablix being #1. This session officially announced that the map control will make to the Kilimanjaro release (now officially called SQL Server 2008 R2). Later on, Thierry was kind enough to show me a demo of the map pre-release bits. One of the data modes is using the SQL Server 2008 geospatial data types which would let you map any region in the world. Thierry showed a cool report showing the worldwide sales of SQL Server, where each country had a different color gradient based on the sales volume.

After lunch, I hang around the BI area in the learning center to answer questions and rub shoulders with Microsoft employees and peers. I was surprised to learn that there are only two Reporting Services-related sessions for the entire TechEd and one of them is mine! All of a sudden, I felt 2" taller. Later on, I felt adventurous to learn something completely new and attended a SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering only to realize how much I don't know about it since I've never used it. BTW, there are great advancements in the SQL Server 2008 failover clustering, such as ability to upgrade or patch a cluster node without stopping it.