I cut my DBA teeth on IBM's DB2 UDB EEE (enough acronyms) back in the 90's. I have always appreciated the scalability that is available with a MPP architecture. So a couple of years ago I was excited to hear that SQL Server was going to have a MPP architecture available. Now I am at SQLPass Summit 2011 and seeing the PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) and the hardware offerings by Dell and HP to scale that up and out. However, I was disappointed to learn that this technology does not extend to Analysis...
/* EDIT - This problem has been fixed in the latest SQL Server 2008 R2 Cumulative Update package. It was identified that changing the aggregation design without reprocessing the aggregations prior to a ProcessUpdate on the dimensions causes this problem and it is a bug */ Many implementations require the use of ProcessUpdate to support Type 1 slowly changing dimensions. ProcessUpdate drops all of the affected indexes and aggregations in partitions affected by data that changes in the Dimension on...
I am currently sitting in a seminar on BI in the Cloud by John Welch at the PASS Summit 2009. SQL Server Azure looks promising for a variety of applications. Currently it only supports SQL Server relational database services but future plans to include the BI stack of SQL Server. I have yet to see how loading of data is handled and security is handled but it seems to have a lot of potential for small data sets (< 10 GB). Couple of points: Apparently data manipulation is slower than normal SQL...