Microsoft SQL Server: Project REAL

Microsoft SQL Server: Project REAL—Business Intelligence in Practice

"Project REAL is a cooperative effort between Microsoft and a number of technology partners in the business intelligence (BI) industry to build on actual customer scenarios to discover best practices for creating BI applications based on SQL Server 2005. The term REAL in Project REAL is an acronym for Reference implementation, End-to-end, At scale, and Lots of users. Find out which partners are participating in Project REAL.

Project REAL uses authentic customer data to work through customer deployment issues and to address the full range of real-world challenges that companies face when analyzing large data sets. These challenges include:

•	Design of schemas—both relational and multidimensional
•	Implementation of data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes
•	Design and deployment of client front-end systems, both for reporting and for interactive analysis
•	Sizing of systems for production
•	Management and maintenance of systems on an ongoing basis, including incremental updates to the data

.."

Sometimes this kind of “real world” information can be pretty cool. If it helps keep you from re-inventing the wheel and to learn from other people’s successes and failures, then it’s time well spent. And sometimes it’s… um… less than cool… um… yeah…

One day, “real soon now,” I’ll be playing in the business intelligence space, doing analysis on tens of millions of rows of data, so spending a few hours reviewing these documents and webcasts now makes sense.

Now to just actually do it...  ;)

(via ~gux (Gustavo Larriera) – Project REAL)