sql server data warehouse: The prestigious Intelligent Enterprise Readers Choice awards for 24
strategic business applications was announced last week. Apparently
Microsoft SQL Server BI seems to swept all the BI readers choice
awards beating longtime industry BI heavy weights like Cognos &
Business Objects. Amazingly, reporting Services being such a young kid
on block seems to have beaten Business Objects with its might of
Crystal & Business Objects. Hope SQL BI will maintain the same
momentum and increase it in 2005.

OLAP/Multidimensional Analysis
Winner - Microsoft AS 2000
Runnerup- Cognos Powerplay

Enterprise Business Intelligence Suite
Winner - SQL 2000 Reporting Services; MS AS 2000; MS BI
Accelerator
Runner Up - Cognos Enterprise BI

Adhoc Querying & Reporting
Winner - SQL 2000 Reporting Services
Runner Up - Business Objects-Web Intelligence

Extraction, Transformation & Load
Winner - Informatica PowerCenter
Runner Up - SQL Server DTS

DBMS
Winner - Oracle 10g
Runner up - SQL Server 2000

Apart from it MS seems to have the B2B integration, Application
integration, knowledge management & GIS segments as well.


This provides a clear signal of popularity of SQL BI as an Enterprise
BI platform.

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=30000377

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Huh ? Adhoc querying with Reporting Services ? I would like to see this
implemented on an OLAP environment... RS has no notion of dimensions, let
alone levels. It returns flattened recordsets... The marketing team
deserves the prize ;-)

Tom

We have some different notion of Adhoc reporting....
For me its the ability to allow a user to create a report on the fly other
the web.
(Like Webintelligence do)
For this test, the adhoc query appear to be the ability to render a report
online, which is somewhat different.
And from a Tom perspective its the ability to manipulate an OLAP cube, which
is (again) a different approach! (for this is adhoc analysis, not adhoc
reporting)

So, where can we found the "definition" used for adhoc reporting in the case
of this B.I. contest?

"Tom VdP" <TomVdP@discussions.microsoft.com> a écrit dans le message de
news: 64513D14-CEB3-42FE-B84B-56ED737CBF83@microsoft.com...
[quoted text, click to view]

While I would not say that Reporting Services is an ad-hoc reporting system
(until Report Builder ships in SQL 2005), I don't think OLAP and ad-hoc are
synonymous. I think ad-hoc means that users can easily and quickly specify a
the data they want and visualize the results. Multi-dimensional metadata and
pre-computed aggregates can make ad-hoc better but are not required.

--
Brian Welcker
Group Program Manager
Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services

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