Sydney SQL Server Enterprise User Group: 2 March 2011

DBD: Delivering Self-Service Managed BI with PowerPivot

 

First of all, thank you to Peter Myers for delivering an informative presentation.

A big thank you to Tony Finnemore for “minding the store” while I was abroad at the MVP Summit.

Congratulations to Ade from NPG for winning the major door prize at the last meeting, a license of the Idera SQL Admin Toolset (valued at AUD $432) that was generously provided by Idera (www.idera.com) and Tony Finnemore from SQL Tools (www.sqltools.com.au).

News

DBD: Delivering Self-Service Managed BI with PowerPivot One of the pillars of the SQL Server 2008 R2 release is Managed Self-Service BI. The SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel add-in is a key offering in this pillar, and delivers an entirely new analytic experience to Excel 2010. The add-in allows analysts to load and prepare large volumes of data from various sources to create a multidimensional model.The model can be enriched with sophisticated calculations. Then the model can then be used as the source for PivotTable and PivotChart reports. And yet that’s not the end of the story. With the SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint add-in, the Excel workbooks that host the PowerPivot model can be catalogued in SharePoint and exposed as a data source for other Excel and Reporting Services reports. These SharePoint hosted models can then be managed by IT with scheduled data refreshes from the originating data stores.In this session, you will be introduced to the two add-ins. An end-to-end series of theory, demonstrations and discussion will describe how you can effectively leverage the add-ins with your own analysis and reporting requirements.