The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

3.1. The Microsoft DW/BI Toolset

The core set of DW/BI tools that Microsoft Corporation sells is Microsoft SQL Server 2005. SQL Server includes several major components of primary interest for DW/BI projects:

• The relational engine (RDBMS) to manage and store the dimensional data warehouse database.

• Integration Services to build the extract, transformation, and load (ETL) system.

• An OLAP database in Analysis Services to support users' queries, particularly ad hoc use.

• Analysis Services data mining to develop statistical data mining models, and also to include those models in advanced analytic applications.

• Reporting Services to build predefined reports. Most of the Reporting Services features are most appropriate for the DW/BI team, but you may provide some ad hoc query and report building functionality with Report Builder.

• Development and management tools, especially SQL Server BI Development Studio and SQL Server Management Studio, to build and manage your DW/BI system.

The SQL Server product contains the software necessary to build, deploy, populate, manage, and access your DW/BI system. A second significant set of Microsoft tools are designed for the business user. These include Microsoft Office, notably Excel, Office Web Components, Data Analyzer, Performance-Point Server, Business Scorecard Manager, and SharePoint Services.

Office and SharePoint provide tools that you can use to build end-user applications to access the data warehouse databases. Many DW/BI systems supplement Microsoft ...