M-A-O-L

Microsoft’s Hadoop play is shaping up, and it includes Excel. Curious to see how the marriage of Excel and Hadoop is going to work out.

Good 28 page whitepaper on NoSQL for SQL Server developers, first familiarizing the reader with NoSQL, then showing what NoSQL options there are in the Microsoft and Azure stack. Also a fair bit of positioning and what are appropriate use cases for NoSQL.

Gartner released it’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, and Oracle apparently is sponsoring it for the public.

We have to obvious suspects in the leaders quadrant: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP, as well as a few smaller folks. Most of the remaining vendors are in the niche players quadrant, there are no visionaries and just two in the challengers quadrant.

The market according to Gartner appears to be mature, and most vendors have found a good (or should I say: boring?) balance between vision and execution.

Andrew Fryer is Looking backwards over a decade of Microsof BI. And while a lot has changed on the technology stack, he feels that the requirements for BI professionals is still the same. I guess it’ll be a while until my dream of a real AI being able to understand what we want without us telling it in detail will come true…

Merv Adrian, who just announced he’s going to Gartner, is quite negative on MS’ SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse in Microsoft Leaps Late, Lags with SQL Server PDW. Seems that Microsoft, besides being two years late to the party, also violated quite a few unwritten analyst treatment rules around the launch of PDW at SQL PASS by not having a good message around PDW, no analyst briefing day, no additional material on its website.

Interesting read into what’s shaping analyst’s (first) impressions of technology launches.

Just a quick pointer to the Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) Team’s Blog. May come in handy when looking at moving over to SQL Server. Check How To Migrate Oracle’s Sample HR Schema to SQL Server for a run-through with screenshots based on Oracle’s sample schema.

Andrew Fryer wrote a reference post about SQL Server Redundancy earlier this month about the pros and cons of clustering and mirroring, so it’s about time I mention it here! His motivation was an internal request at Microsoft:

If there are internal Microsoft staff who don’t know when to use what, then I imagine there must still be confusion in the real world about these two approaches.

Very much so 🙂 Same principles also apply to Oracle and Sybase, except their integration with Cluster and OS is less tight (yet – probably more to come from Oracle here), and Sybase’s Replication Server doesn’t offer synchronous mirroring.

Microsoft formally announced its Windows Azure Platform Appliance today, as TechCrunchIT reports.

Dell, eBay, Fujitsu, and HP intend to deploy the appliance in their datacenters to offer new cloud services.

While that’s nice to know, I’m much more interested to hear by when we can get our own appliance, and what the configuration sizes and support requirements are going to be.

On a related note, the SQL CAT team released its SQL Azure Customer Best Practices a while ago.