1. The Changing Fabric of BI Environments: Supporting Line-of-Business Personnel and Data Scientists

    Today's BI environments have split personalities. They must support the production of routine reports and analyses used every day for decision-making by line-of-business employees, and yet, also enable data scientists and data crunchers to “freewheel” through the data in an unplanned, experimental fashion. What magic is this? How can implementers create a sustainable BI environment with these …Read More

  2. Strategies for Data Exploration and Analysis in the Age of Big Data Analytics

    Organizations today are seeking to explore and analyze big data to detect patterns and find anomalies across terabytes or petabytes of raw big data. Whether you're trying to discover the root cause of the latest customer churn or the hidden costs that are eroding your bottom line, you need analytic tools and techniques that work well with large volumes of all data, not just unstructured and multi-…Read More

  3. ICYMI: Data platform momentum

    By SQL Server Team The last couple months have seen the addition of several new products that extend Microsoft's data platform offerings. At the end of January, Quentin Clark outlined his vision for the complete data platform, exploring the various inputs that are driving new application patterns, new considerations for handling data of all shapes and sizes, and ultimately changing the way we can …Read More

  4. SQL Server 2014 and the DBA: Building Bridges

    By SQL Server Team Guest blog post by: SQL Server MVP Denise McInerney – Vice President of Marketing for PASS and a Data Engineer at Intuit – began her career as a SQL Server DBA in 1998 and now applies her deep understanding of data to enable analytic solutions to business problems. She is founder of the PASS Women in Technology virtual chapter, a speaker at user group meetings and conference…Read More

  5. Introducing the Microsoft Analytics Platform System – the turnkey appliance for big data analytics

    By SQL Server Team At the Accelerate your Insights event last week, Satya Nadella introduced the new Microsoft Analytics Platform System (APS) as Microsoft's solution for delivering “Big Data in a box.” APS is an evolution of our SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) appliance which builds upon the high performance and scale capabilities of that MPP version of SQL Server, and now introduces…Read More

  6. Progressive Insurance data performance grows by factor of four, fueling business growth online experience

    By SQL Server Team At the Accelerate your Insights event last week, Quentin Clark described how SQL Server 2014 was now part of a platform that had in-built in-memory technology across all data workloads. In particular with this release Microsoft has added in-memory Online Transaction Processing delivering breakthrough performance for applications in throughput and latency. One of the early adopte…Read More

  7. Power Map April update for Office 365 now available and Preview expiration removed in Office 2013

    By Power BI Team The Power Map team is excited and proud to bring you the April update of Microsoft Power Map for Excel. This update brings new functionality to Power Map and improves some existing features. Power Map users with an active Office 365 subscription will receive this update through Office 365 Click-To-Run if they have automatic updates enabled. Before we detail the updates, the team i…Read More

  8. Customers using Microsoft technologies to accelerate their insights

    By SQL Server Team At yesterday's Accelerate your insights event in San Francisco, we heard from CEO Satya Nadella, COO Kevin Turner and CVP Quentin Clark about how building a data culture in your company is critical to success. By combining data-driven DNA with the right analytics tools, anyone can transform data into action. Many companies, and many of our customers, are already experiencing the…Read More