Business Intelligence is Hot
Speaker Interview — Bill Baker

We managed to catch up with Bill Baker, General Manager of Business Intelligence, Microsoft SQL Server Group, during his travels around the U.S. to launch SQL Server Reporting Services. Bill answered a few questions on BI's importance, its status, and Yukon. You can hear Bill during his keynote at VSLive! San Francisco March 26.

Business Intelligence is a hot topic. Why now? Is this more than glorified reporting, or OLAP with a data cube?

Business Intelligence is hot because it represents a real way to achieve competitive advantage. As competitors in markets often have equal access to technology, capital, and customers, the company that learns best from its customers, its competitors, and its own employees can win. BI technologies range from relational databases to extraction, transformation, and loading tools (ETL); to OLAP cubes; to reporting and end-user tools like Excel. Microsoft's goal is to provide a complete, end-to-end BI platform including tools for end users.

Industry analysts believe that large enterprises will have a mixed environment. Not only will .NET and J2EE coexist, but you'll see various data sources, from Oracle to DB2 to SQL Server. What is Microsoft doing to help tie these islands of data together?

We love it when companies use SQL Server to store and manage their operational data! And more and more companies are doing just that. But, in the real world, we see pretty much every database platform. SQL Server's BI tools, including DTS, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services, all access data equally well from SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and other data sources common in enterprises.

How should developers approach integrating sources as diverse as OLAP, data mining, SAP R4, and the diversity of RDBMSs in real-world IT settings to create solutions today?

It's a heterogeneous world, especially when it comes to data sources. One of the key goals of data warehousing and Business Intelligence is to present "one version of the truth" to decision makers in companies and organizations. With Yukon, we are making a large investment in ETL tools to help IT departments get a better handle on more operational data, more frequently.

How will Yukon, with native XML and CLR support, change the BI landscape?

XML and CLR support help BI scenarios in two ways. First, there are a lot of interesting data sources out there. Not everything fits best into a relational model. XML, and to a certain extent, the CLR, help us model non-relational data sources and yet consume them in BI tools. Second, the CLR, Web services, and XML help us close the loop with operational applications.

There seem to be contradictory opinions on the importance of the CLR in Yukon. Some say database pros using T-SQL won't see any change, while others expect this to open up SQL Server to VB and C# developers. Can you explain why having the CLR in Yukon is important and how it will impact Visual Studio developers?

Developers and DBAs using T-SQL will see no change in Yukon other than various T-SQL enhancements. Developers and DBAs who want to use Visual Basic .NET or C# or any other CLR language can do so. Yukon will support CLR languages for stored procedures and for user-defined functions. This is important as it provides a rich variety of tools to accommodate varying skill sets and preferences as well as matching the right tool to the job.