Tech Ed US (Day 2)

First, I went to see the Paul Flessner’s keynote. I learned that Reporting Services will be available in all editions of Yukon, including Express! And, custom security will be available in RS Standard Edition as well! Now, we are talking! For more information about how different versions of Yukon will stack against each other, read this comparison document.

Next, I went to see Brian Welcker’s presentation about the new report viewer controls in RS 2005. The presentation was in one of the biggest conference halls and it was almost full (with perhaps some 600 people). This speaks by itself about the traction RS is getting. Brian actually wrote a whitepaper about the new features in RS 2005. It is nice to see Reporting Services evolving!

Next, I went to see the real-time OLAP presentation from the Analysis Services Team and shake hands with Amir Netz and Richard Tkatchuk. The presentation made a great case for real-time OLAP with proactive caching. The motto was “no more explicit cube processing!”. In my opinion though (my sole opinion, mind you), pro-active caching may not be that useful with data warehousing where data is loaded in a deterministic fashion. In this case, it may be more appropriate to process cubes explicitly, once ETL processes are done. That said, I can see real-time OLAP being really useful if the cube is built on top of the OLTP database. Something to think about…