My Wish List for SQL Server.vNext

In an attempt to give customers more transparency, Microsoft recently published a Cloud Platform Roadmap. The product groups are also actively seeking feedback for the on-premise products (also known as boxed products). For example, if you have subscribed to the Power BI.vNext public preview, you can use the BI in SQL vNext forum to provide feedback (not sure why there instead of on connect.microsoft.com).

So, here is my open high-level SQL Server.vNext wish list:

• SSAS – Merge Multidimensional and Tabular and take best from both. I like the in-memory engine and flexibility of Tabular but at the same time I miss the MD pro features. To put this in perspective, I’d like to see the following features added to Tabular:
  • Additional relationship types, such as M2M relationships (it looks like this will happen judging by the Power BI features), multi-grain relationships (joining to a table at a higher grain than the key), role-playing
  • Scope assignments
  • Sets
  • MDX support for business calculations – BI pros have been learning MDX for the past 15 years so this knowledge shouldn’t be wasted. Besides, some constructs are better expressed in MDX not to mention that Tabular doesn’t have support for hierarchy navigation.
  • Enterprise scale features – parallel partition processing within a table, ability to define which columns will be hierarchized (measures typically shouldn’t, yet now every column is hierarchized), compression on calculated columns
  • Removal of DirectQuery limitations
  • Custom (non Windows-based) security – This applies to both MD and Tabular in order to allow developers to embed reports in custom applications.
  • Better toolset – No matter how good SSAS gets, it won’t go far if there is no good client support. Excel and Power View need catching up. For example, Excel need to generate DAX natively, optimize MDX queries (especially for detail-level reports), and add Power View support for MD, plus numerous enhancement to catch to modern interactive tools.
  • Tabular Designer enhancements – it’s painful to wait SSDT to refresh after every step.
• SSRS
  • Report Designer should continue where it left off in 2010 when focus was shifted on Power View. See top requested features on connect.microsoft.com, especially in the area of report parameters.
  • Power View – conditional formatting, drillthrough, SSAS action support, mapping enhancements (region coloring, point-to-point mapping)
  • Ability to embed Power View reports in custom apps.
  • Data alerts on Power View and SSRS in native mode.
  • Q&A on prem
  • Bring Power BI features to boxed products. Since we decouple Power BI from SharePoint, installing it on a local IIS server shouldn’t be an issue.
• SSIS – Project mode and development enhancements in 2012 were great but the product group should take a look at competing products, especially those that attempt to automate ETL. I don’t care much about the Data Flow since I typically use the ETL pattern, so I won’t comment on the data flow tasks.
  • Data profiling should be built in the data sources instead of separated as a separate task
  • Change management – make it easy to see what source mappings have changed. Don’t make me go through input and output connectors to fix these mappings when they change.
  • Scale out ETL across multiple servers
• SQL Database Engine – Based on what I do, I need better support for data warehousing.
  • Improve query optimizer for large joins
  • Unify memory technologies – in most cases you want to have both in-memory tables and fast analysis.
  • Enhance clustered columnstore indexes to support additional regular indexes. See my post for more info.
• MDS/DQS
  • Ideally, unify MDS and DQS into a single product as there is a significant overlap.
  • MDS Excel add-in is good but usability needs to be improved. No one wants to scroll a long pick list of a domain-based attribute to find something.
  • Ability to reference an entity from another model.