Microsoft recently announced CTP 3 for SQL Server ‘Denali’, which boasts of improved BI capabilities like Self Service Alerting, Self Service Reporting, improved Office integration, SharePoint Shared Service, better VS Tooling for developers and more.
Some of the key feature highlights are
- Self Service Reporting Capability – new a reporting tool for visually exploring data to answer ad-hoc questions, mainly designed for end-users – codenamed ‘Project Crescent’.
- Self-Service Alerting: Can use existing Report Builder or BIDS reports to setup alerts when the report data changes (requires SharePoint)
- New Excel and Word 2007/2010 renderers (allows exporting data directly to Excel, for instance)
- Reporting Service now works as a SharePoint Shared Service - supports Claims, built-in Scale with load balancing, PowerShell commandlets, and cross-farm report consumption, along with benefits to configuration, deployment and administration.
- BI Development Studio integrated with Visual Studio 2010
- RDLC Designer and ReportViewer control have been upgraded to support “Denali” codebase.
The team has also changed it’s release policy for VS integration -
..we expect BI development Studio to be available in future versions of Visual Studio, weeks after the availability of the release, instead of having to wait for the next release of SQL server to update it. This was one of the most requested capabilities by our developer community.
Besides BI improvements, the CTP also features a lot of improvements like AlwaysOn, LocalDB, support on Windows Server Core, Database Recovery Advisor, In-memory Column Store, better Full-Text search, support for upto 15000 table partitions, Data Quality Services and more.