Zach Skyles Owens

By Zach Skyles Owens

Just minutes ago at TechEd 2008 Developers in Orlando Dave Campbell, Technical Fellow, was on stage with Bill Gates doing the Data Platform demo which included a host of exciting Microsoft Technologies.

• SQL Server 2008 - Supports any data
• SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) - Quickly provisioning for unpredictable scale
• Microsoft Sync Framework - Keeping all data synchronized

Building this demo has been one of the most rewarding experiences in my career.  Everyone involved has put in 110%.

When we set out to build this demo we spent a lot of time making sure that the architecture was something that we have heard customers asking for.  Since SSDS is such a new piece of the Microsoft Data Platform going through this process was an interesting experience.

In this article I will quickly highlight the architecture of this application and describe why we made some of the architecture decisions.

Scenario

This application was built around a fictitious company called Trey Research.  Trey Research is a news agency that has launched a new strategy aimed at turning bloggers into paid journalists by paying them for their articles and photos.  Bloggers from around the world submit articles and images through either a web application or Windows Mobile app.  New analysts at Trey Research find the best articles and images for a given geographic area of interest, combine them into a story and sell them to companies like MSNBC; paying the content creators in the process.

Architecture

Here is a high-level overview of the architecture.

SQL Server 2008 and WPF

So starting from the News Analyst WPF App and SQL Server 2008.  We chose to use local SQL Server database connected to a WPF desktop application for a number of reasons including.

• High Performance of a Local Database
• Powerful Analytics of the SQL Server platform
• Ability to execute Spatial Queries to search for relevant content
• Storage of all content types including geo-tagged text and images

News Analysts at Trey Research can search for content with a power UI including Spatial and Time based queries.  SQL Server uses powerful analytics on the back end to determine the target demographic for the content.  Some of the exciting technologies being used are:

• FILESTREAM to store binary data
• New DateTimeOffset type used to store the date and time a photo was taken, which preserves time zone information
• Spatial queries and indexes which allow for the fast retrieval of geo-tagged data.
• SQL Server Reporting Services to provide rich visualization of analytical data.

SQL Server Data Services, Web Application and Mobile Device

All of this content is submitted via a web site or via a Windows Mobile application.  The content submitted via the web site or mobile app are stored in SSDS.  Their core competency is managing news content, not building Internet scale data centers.  Trey Research decided to use SSDS as the data storage platform for a number of reasons:

• To quickly provision for the unpredictable scale of what is turning out to be a very popular web site
• The nature of news is that a large event can produce huge spikes in traffic, so they are relying on Microsoft’s global infrastructure and Service Level Agreements
• SSDS is acting as a Data Hub where web and mobile devices submit content

Microsoft Sync Framework

The final piece of magic in this application is the Microsoft Sync Framework.  Sync is used to pull data down from SSDS into the local SQL Server database in addition to moving data from the mobile device into SSDS.  The sync framework provides a powerful platform for dealing with things like conflict detection, etc.

Summary

As you can see there were a number of architecture decisions that had to be made.  Trey Research is using many of the powerful features of the Microsoft Data Platform to quickly build this application.  I’ll continue to post information about this demo.

It has been a long time coming and I’m really excited to announce that we have finally released a series of 22 screencasts on the SQL Server Channel 9 site.  These screencasts were part of a global training event taking the student through BI project lifecycle using Microsoft tools.  I’d recommend starting from the Platform Overview.

In an effort to organize the content on Channel 9 we have created a wiki which you can access at http://channel9.msdn.com/sql.

Over the next few months this will be converted to a Tag Center once the Beta version of Channel 9 goes Gold.  In the meantime I will be maintaining the wiki by hand.

If there are specific interviews or screencasts that you would like to see related to SQL Server and Business Intelligence just let me know.

Enjoy!

I was recently blown away by a feature I ran into on the Business Objects website called Fiat Lux. It’s a short marketing video describing the company’s mission and vision. Normally this type of thing is pretty boring and not worth mentioning. Business Objects has proven this not to be the case. I’m very impressed with the following statement made during the presentation.

“We are not a Business Intelligence company.
We are in the business of helping companies become more intelligent.”

Below are some screen captures from the video which I strongly encourage you to watch by clicking here.

Technorati Tags: Business Objects, business intelligence, marketing

I recently stumbled across the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite and so far I’m really impressed. After doing some research what I discovered is that Pentaho is an Open Source BI company with a service oriented revenue model. What they have done is hired the key developers from a variety of Open Source products such as JFree and built/enhanced those core technologies for an end-to-end BI solution. They were founded by five (hence the “pent”) extremely accomplished BI experts and have been marketing themselves for less then a year.

I have had some insightful answers to technical questions I’ve posted on their forums which is a requirement for a quality open source project. I’ve also been told that their lead engineers spend a certain portion of their time doing technical support so at this point you may actually be able to get the product developer on the phone if you are having issues.

If you are interested in checking them out, running their Pre-Configuration Installation was a quick three step process on my Windows workstation.

• Download the Pentaho Open BI Suite
• Unzip the Product
• Click on “start-pentaho.bat”

I ran into some issues getting it to run on my Fedora Core 6 workstation, but I think those are related to some configuration issues on my end.

This will provide you with a JBoss Application Server and Portal running a bunch of well put together BI Reports and Dashboards. It even has an example Dashboard with Google Maps integration.

If you end up checking this out or have implementation experience with their products please let me know as we are evaluating using some of their components in a project right now.

Technorati Tags: Pentaho, Open Source, Business Intelligence, Red Hat, JBoss, Fedora, JFree