My article on Business Intelligence (BI) is published by SDA Magazine-Indonesia edition. It contains SQL Server 2005 capability as BI platform. MS has do many great enhanchments in BI area with this new product. It’s really kick some other compitors, specially for entry level BI market. Imagine this: with the cheap price of database server (comparing with Oracle and another BI player such as Business Object), your company will have BI solution in the box.

The coolest things I like is integration service or SSIS. It replaced its father DTS, but it is not DTS. MS has rewrite it, make it DTS more powerfull than DTS. It can collect data from various data source such as Oracle, DB2, flat file, XML, or any OLEDB and ODBC compliant data source. Not only importing, I also can put some function, calculation, or validation in the SSIS package. Than the loaded data on the data warehouse is have been summarized, agregated, or validated. If the developer want to do more, they can invoke it with some .Net coding. It really cool and challenge for every developer to do it.

The data warehouse than can be minned with 7 statistics algorithm, make it easier to analize and read the pattern of the data. The presentation layer is reporting service. Built and present on the browser, it is very easy to deploy across the intranet. The good things is user can do the report by themself by adhoc report designer. Also, the pivot tables capability of MS Excell still compatible with this BI platform.