There are a ton of new project names coming out of the Microsoft BI conference in Seattle, which might seem a bit confusing, so I thought I would share my take on this for those who can’t justify the time or carbon to be in the states this week.

Kilimanjaro is a bigger mountain than Katmai,  but the project is not the next release of SQL Server 2008, it’s a BI set of features that integrate into SQL Server and comprises two projects that you may have heard about..

  • Gemini.  This is a set of tools to further empower the user to create their own reports and analytics, leaving the IT guys and DBA’s to focus on the collection and performance of the data.  This will all be integrated into SharePoint, like Reporting Services already in SQL Server.
  • Madison is the project to integrate the DATAllegro technology acquired by Microsoft a couple of months ago and will enable to SQL Server to support the predicted largest data warehouses.  Another part of this project will be to add in the other recent acquisition.

The title of my post refers to the fact that like a lot of conference announcements none of this is going to be ready for some time and even the earliest betas are a long way away, so the only impact it should have on deployments to day is that this will just add more useful stuff to the BI projects built on SQL Server.