Posts

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 Is Semi-born

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Thanks for Russell Christopher’s blog, we now know that the final release of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 is very close to going live. I will update this blog when the download link is known. I listed the SP2 major BI-related enhancements in this blog. The most significant ones (RS-SharePoint integration, enhanced Excel OLAP and data mining features) makes SP2 a major milestone in the Microsoft Business Intelligence roadmap.

CTP3 Build of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 Released

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In the spirit of the season, the SQL Server team give us the third (and probably last before the final release) CTP3 build (version 9.00.3033.0000) for the forthcoming SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals

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The newly released CTP7 of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (aka DataDude) now supports bi-directional schema updates. Once you generate the scripts from your database schema, you can choose either the database or the scripts as a source of changes and commit the changes to the target. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals requires Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition.

SQL Server 2005 SP2 CTP 2 Build Released Today

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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.

And the MVP Award Goes To

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I learned today that my MVP award has been renewed. This will be my third year as an MVP for Windows Systems – SQL Server.

SQL Server 2005 SP1 Released

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SQL Server 2005 SP1 was released yesterday. Kudos to Microsoft for releasing SP1 on time!


As the conventional wisdom goes, one should postpone deployment of production applications until the first service pack has been released. Well, that time has come to pass. May your SQL Server 2005-based solutions be successful!

Public CTP of SQL Server Express To Be Available Soon

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Today, Microsoft announced that SQL Server Express Advanced will be available publicly instead of distributed as a private beta. The CTP (Community Technology Preview) build could be downloaded here (link will be live soon).


 


You can post question and comments in the SQL Express MSDN Forum or enter bugs and feature requests on the MSDN Product Feedback Center.

Prologika Forums to be Upgraded Tonight

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Telligent has done it again! Community Server 2.0 is out and it’s too sleek to ignore. I am planning to upgrade Prologika Forums to CS 2.0 tonight. If all is well, tomorrow Prologika Forums will have a facelift and more features. I hope the upgrade process won’t last too long and won’t cause service interruptions.