Eighth Blog Birthday

Today marks eight years since my first ever post on this blog, and every year on this date I write a review of what’s happened to me professionally and what’s gone on in the world of Microsoft BI in the previous year.

For me, 2012 has been yet another busy year. The SSAS Tabular book that Marco, Alberto and I wrote – “SQL Server Analysis Services 2012: The BISM Tabular Model” – was published in July and has been selling well, and the balance of my consultancy and training work has started to move away from Multidimensional and MDX towards Tabular, PowerPivot and DAX. It’s always exciting to learn something new and, frankly, the lack of any significant new functionality in Multidimensional and MDX has meant they have got a bit boring for me; at the same time, though, moving out of my comfort zone has been disconcerting. It seems like I’m not the only Microsoft BI professional feeling like this though: the most popular post on my blog by a long chalk was this one on Corporate and Self-Service BI, and judging by the comments it resonated with a lot of people out there.

Whether or not Microsoft is neglecting corporate BI (and I’m not convinced it is), it’s definitely making a serious investment in self-service BI. The biggest Microsoft BI release of this year was for me not SQL Server 2012 but Office 2013. That’s not to say that SQL Server 2012 wasn’t a big release for BI, but that Office 2013 was massive because of the amount of functionality that was packed into it and because the functionality was so well executed. You can read this post if you want details on why I think it’s significant, but I’ve really enjoyed playing with Excel 2013, PowerPivot, Power View and Office 365; there’s more cool stuff in form of Mobile BI, GeoFlow and Data Explorer coming next year, all of which are very much part of the Office 2013 story too. No Microsoft BI professional can afford to ignore all this.

The other big theme in Microsoft BI this year, and indeed BI as a whole, was Big Data. I reckon that 90% of everything I read about Big Data at the moment is utter b*llocks and as a term it’s at the peak of its hype cycle; Stephen Few has it right when he says it’s essentially a marketing campaign. However, as with any over-hyped technological development there’s something important buried underneath all the white papers, and that’s the increasing use of tools like Hadoop for analysing the very large data sets that traditional BI/database tools can’t handle, and the convergence of the role of business analyst and BI professional in the form of the data scientist. I’m still not convinced that Hadoop and the other tools that currently get lumped in under the Big Data banner will take over the world though: recently, I’ve seen a few posts like this one that suggest that most companies don’t have the expertise necessary for using them. Indeed, Google, the pioneer of MapReduce, felt the need to invent Dremel/BigQuery (which is explicitly referred to as an OLAP tool here and elsewhere) to provide the easy, fast analysis of massive datasets that MapReduce/Hadoop cannot give you. My feeling is that the real future of Big Data lies with tools like Dremel/BigQuery and Apache Drill rather than Hadoop; certainly, when I played with BigQuery it clicked with me in a way that Hadoop/HDInsight didn’t. I hope someone at Microsoft has something similar planned… or maybe this is the market that PDW and Polybase are meant to address? In which case, I wonder if we’ll see a cloud-based PDW at some point?