Upgrading to SQL Server 2005
When you purchase SQL Server 2005 you are essentially purchasing a family of products, each product providing benefits for various aspects of your business. Click here to see top business reasons for upgrading your Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence systems.
Here are the key technology benefits for upgrading to SQL Server 2005. Exhaustive details of these features are available at Microsoft SQL Server website. We have summarized them here for your convenience.
Summary of Features
- New enterprise-capable Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) solution to load and manage multi-terabyte data warehouse.
- Up to 2x enhanced performance on OLAP dimensions with Unified Dimension Model (UDM)
- New ad hoc reporting with Report Builder combined with enhanced enterprise reporting
- Expanded data mining capabilities with five new algorithms
- Enhanced business productivity through tighter integration with Microsoft Office System and Visual Studio 2005
- Analysis Services will enable users to calculate key performance indicators and perform data mining
- Reporting Services will enable users to generate customized reports from the database
- Stored procedures can be written with tighter error handling
SQL Server 2005 Integration Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) offers a redesigned and highly scalable enterprise ETL platform for building high-performance data integration solutions for data warehousing. As a result, you get a more holistic understanding of your business
- Rich development environment uses Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 as a collaborative stage for dependable and relevant solutions.
- Visual debugging tools help you set breakpoints on packages, containers, task events, and data viewers for watching data as it moves through the data flow
- Data quality tools such as Fuzzy Lookup and Fuzzy Grouping components provide inexact matching and de-duplication
SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio
Business Intelligence Development Studio offers the first integrated development environment designed specifically for the BI developer. Built on Visual Studio 2005, Business Intelligence Development Studio delivers a rich, integrated platform for developing business intelligence applications.
- Solution Explorer helps you manage all your different projects in a solution from a single window.
- The Properties window enables you to view and change the properties of objects, such as packages, that are open in editors and designers.
- The Designer window helps you create or modify business intelligence objects and provides both a code view and a design view of an object.
- Simple customization provides easy-to-use configurations that suit your working style.
- Project templates for SQL Server Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services provide a context for developing specific constructs
SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) data mining and OLAP capabilities help you build complex analytical models that you can integrate with your business operations. Easy to use, extensible, and flexible capabilities make data mining more accessible than ever before.
- Unified Dimensional Model provides a central metadata repository defining business entities, business logic, calculations, and metrics.
- Data mining algorithms help you discover patterns and uncover business data to reveal hidden trends.
- Proactive caching delivers a highly compressed and optimized data cache that is automatically maintained as the data in the underlying source databases changes.
- Advanced BI capabilities such as KPIs, translations, semi-additive measures, and multi-dimensional expressions (MDX) scripts help improve your decision making
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS) offers a complete and comprehensive reporting solution for creating, managing, and delivering traditional managed reports, interactive end-user reports, and embedded reports.
- Report authoring uses a graphical report designer tool with easy-to-use report wizards.
- Embedded reports use client-side reporting controls to embed real-time reports into an application at design time.
- Report Builder provides an ad hoc reporting tool that enables business users to create their own reports and explore corporate data.
- SharePoint integration provides out-of-the-box Web Parts to deliver reports directly in Office SharePoint Server 2007.
- Management Studio enables administrators to organize reports and data sources, schedule report execution and delivery, and track reporting history.
- Flexible and extensible reporting for both traditional and interactive reports offers numerous formats with extensible delivery options.
- Scalability enables SQL Server 2005 to support high-volume environments.
Relational Data Warehouse
SQL Server 2005 offers a security-enhanced, scalable, and highly available relational database engine with improved performance and support for structured and unstructured XML data.
- Table and index partitioning enables fast data load and simplified maintenance for large tables.
- Online index operations help you create, rebuild, or drop an index online.
- Enhanced Transact-SQL (T-SQL) language capabilities offer error handling, recursive queries, and XML support.
- Database mirroring provides a quick standby system for high availability.
- Database snapshots create quick, read-only views of a database.
- Snapshot isolation enables read operations to access the last-committed row even if a write operation has the row locked for an update at that time.
- Support for 64-bit opens the door to new levels of application scalability.
- SQL Server Management Studio helps you operate and maintain BI database objects.
Manage Data More Effectively
In Office Excel 2007, you can more easily discern trends from complex data.You can view metadata stored in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services from within the actual Excel report. In addition, you can quickly add and move dimensions presented in business terms, and report from multiple data sources within a single Excel report. As a result, you can present your analysis with greater clarity and confidence.
- A new results-oriented user interface presents the right tools when you need them most, exposing the extensive features of Office Excel 2007.
- Increased spreadsheet row and column capacity enables you to import and work with up to 1 million rows and 16,000 columns of data.
- Multi-threaded chipsets provide faster calculations by running formulas on multiple processors simultaneously.
- Formulae authoring experience, including a resizable formulae bar and context-based Formulae AutoComplete that exposes column headings while you write the formulae. This helps you write the proper formulae syntax the first time, every time.
- Sorting and filtering helps you quickly find the information you need. Office Excel 2007 supports up to 64 levels to sort data, including the ability to sort by color.
- Enhanced Microsoft PivotTable® views and Microsoft PivotChart® views use data fields to quickly explore and analyze your data.
- Simplified conditional formatting such as heat maps, colored icons, and arrows help you discover trends, exceptions, and patterns in your information.
- Full support for SQL Server Analysis Services enables you to easily connect to a central metadata repository in SQL Server Analysis Services, quickly extract information from your OLAP cube, and expose it within Office Excel 2007 and ProClarity, providing context for the data being analyzed.
- Improved charting tools make it easier to summarize your analysis results in professional-looking charts.
- The data connection library simplifies finding and connecting to external data sources.