The Excel add-in is one of two just released Business Intelligence solutions available for download: Excel Add-in for Analysis Services: http://www.microsoft.com/office/solutions/exceladdin Business Scorecards Accelerator: http://www.microsoft.com/office/solutions/scorecard These are free of charge to licensed customers and include full...

Data Mining is about exploring your data, finding patterns and performing predictions. Where querying and analysis tells you what, data mining tells you why and how. In SQL Server 2005, data mining is made accessible and easy to use through an integrated user interface, cross-product integration and familiar, standard APIs. From the two...

Creating ReportsReporting Services is built on SQL Server 2000, and the metadata definitions are stored in a database. On top of that, the Report Server contains a web service and a Windows service. The web service provides the interface into the system. Each of the underlying data processing, rendering, security and delivery services that sit...

This week I'm in the US again, attending an internal conference for sales, marketing and technical staff. It's our kick-off meeting for the start of the new financial year, in which we look back on last year and set our direction for the coming twelve months. For the next four days (yes, it takes place over the weekend) we have a series of...

If you're interested in finding out more about Visual Studio 2005, we're running two developer events at Microsoft UK in Reading over the next month that will explore the key new features and enhancements in the next release of our developer tools. We're doing the same event as an evening session and a daytime session to offer maximum...

I've had a couple of weeks' silence on the blog, for which I apologise. TechEd was such a full-on experience that it took me a full week's vacation to recover! Overall, we were delighted with the success of the conference. I've browsed through the online feedback for a good proportion of the 290 sessions and the overall...

It's great to visit TechEd Bloggers and discover new bloggers who are writing interesting articles about the event. As an organiser, there's no better way to get the vibe of the event from the floor than to read what others have been up to and the good and bad moments. Overall the conference has been going fairly smoothly from an organisational...

Each year there's a few speakers who compete vigorously throughout the conference to get the best overall session score. This year it could be close! Here's today's leaderboard: Code Title Speaker Score WIN371 Effective Troubleshooting with the Sysinternals Tools Mark Russinovich 8.09 WIN373 Systems Management Server 2003 SP1: Technology...

This morning at TechEd Europe, we announced the introduction of "Express" editions of a number of Visual Studio tools and SQL Server. The Express products are lightweight, easy to use, easy to learn tools for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and students who want to build dynamic Windows applications and Web sites. We also announced the release of...

We started planning today's keynote back in March. Keynotes are always problematic at conferences of the scale of TechEd: most attendees have an expectation that there will be one, but the feedback scores suggest that they're not the absolute highlight of the conference in most cases. We know full well that in an ideal world we'd have Bill...

Over 4000 attendees have registered thus far, leaving just another 2000 to register before the keynote at 10am tomorrow. We had a surge of registrations in the last week, which means we have about 500 more attendees than for last year's conference. As a result, you might see some slightly annoyed-looking speakers, as we now don't have enough...

Scalability Experts have recently published a great white paper (PDF) that compares SQL Server 2000 running on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and benchmarks both versions against known loads. The whitepaper uses a Unisys ES7000 mainframe-class server using Itanium 2 processors. The most interesting results were using the 64-bit edition of...

[By the way, apologies for those who read my blog who have no interest in TechEd Europe, as 90% of my blogs over the next week will have some relation to the event. I'll mix and match session write-ups with organisational and content announcements, so hopefully there's some useful information even if you're not actually attending.] We're less...

I'm heading down to Amsterdam tomorrow to check out the venue and put the last finishing touches to the keynote. As the technical content owner for the event, I'll be blogging throughout the week with details of any session changes, top scoring sessions, pointers to other highlights and answers to your questions, so feel free to drop me a line...

Just seven days to go before the start of TechEd Europe! The session voting is now complete: over 1100 of you took the time to pre-select which sessions you were likely to attend. Nobody is tied to the choices they made, of course, but this information is invaluable to us as we can make a fairly accurate assessment as to which sessions are...