Microsoft had two big annoucements related to BI this week. Both are for Q1 2010 release.
- Kilimanjaro - this is an addition to SQL server for distributed processing of very large databases. They demonstrated a farm of 24 servers X 8 CPUs processing queries of a 150 TB database.
- Gemini - this is taking Excel up a notch to do BI analytics using an in-memory database. They showed Excel with a file of 10,000,000 rows of data. It permits power users to work with big data sets in a very rapid way.