You may or may not have heard by now that the business intelligence capability in SharePoint 2010 now has a platform branding called INSIGHTS.
I will blog more about the features in my “down time” at the SQL PASS conference next week, but I wanted to put the links out to everyone so you can start ramping up on what is coming inside SharePoint 2010 with respect to business intelligence.
First and foremost, the official Insights link: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/product/capabilities/Insights/Pages/default.aspx. Lots of information and resource links posted here - -a great way to take a top down look at what the Insights platform is all about.
If you have completely been ignoring the news and the gossip, then you probably have missed the two biggest architectural features in the Insights platform will be PerformancePoint Services and Excel Services support of PowerPivot (formerly Project Gemini). PerformancePoint Services will utilize the new application services architecture that is now part of SharePoint - -this allows for far greater flexibility in deployment and most importantly, security.
PerformancePoint Services links:
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Excel Services: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424401(office.14).aspx
Report Builder 3.0: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb418434(SQL.10).aspx
Technical Diagrams: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199(office.14).aspx
So, keep reading and don’t get left behind. If you landed here and you are more interested in the other features of SharePoint and not business intelligence, visit my fellow Catapultian Matt’s post here. I will, of course, encourage you to stay here and become more interested in BI, but I’m not into forcing my opinion in anyone, I’ll leave that to the media.
Tags: sharepoint 2010,
insights,
powerpivot,
performancepoint services,
sharepoint conference,
excel services,
excel 2010
Categories: SharePoint |
Insights |
PerformancePoint Services
I figured this was worth a quick post: while many of SQL Server’s aspects are cluster aware, SSIS is not. Why? My guess is that there is not a pressing business need for this to be a cluster aware service – while many companies have vital ETL processes to help run company business, the need for failover in this scenario is not as pressing as in transactional systems.
With that said, I had a customer that was testing the failover of one of their main SQL clusters and suddenly noticed that a more than several jobs failed to run. In helping on the issues, I noticed that they had SSIS steps in the job pointing to the cluster name for pulling out the packages form MSDB, and that, more importantly, someone had forgotten to install the SSIS service on the failover node.
Someone had configured SSIS to point to the cluster on the primary node, but must have forgotten to install the service and do the same config change on the failover node – easy enough fix; but also a good education opportunity for the client as they were not familiar with SSIS at all (transitioning to a new environment for them this past year, so most of this is new for them).
SSIS is not recommend to be configured as a cluster resource, but that does not mean it cannot be used on a SQL Server that is clustered – you just have to be aware of what you are doing and the consequences. In my current scenario, we have SSIS configured to work on the cluster environment, but not as a cluster resource (the second link below will show you how).
Here are the references:
Just be sure to weigh the pros and cons as even the simple config change has its own consequences, in particular the section in the first link on disadvantages of SSIS as a cluster resource.
Tags: ssis,
sql 2008
Categories: SSIS