Madison will follow many of the same principles that DATAllegro employed in designing its DW appliance. Strictly speaking, Madison will be delivered as an appliance-like solution. Madison is different from the current DATAllegro product in terms of the hardware configuration, OS and database.  However, the vast majority of the “secret sauce” that enabled all of the hardware components and the software layer to work together will be carried forward in the Madison solution. Like DATAllegro, Madison relies on using industry standard hardware to keep costs low and facilitate scale-up and scale-out. The plan is to also keep the sales and support model very streamlined for the customer, so that they do not have to work with mulitple vendors to purchase or to log a support ticket.

Our plans to release Madison in early 2010 are on track. Of course there is a lot of work to do between now and then. MTP and TAP beta programs will kick off this June and will run through early 2010.

Madison is planned to have functional parity with the last major release of DATAllegro, with a few critical enhancements to support some unique capabilities in SQL Server 2008. As we draw closer to MTP1 and the TAP programs, we will be able to share more details about the features.

Previous releases of SQL Server will not be supported. Madison is based on SQL Server 2008 Enterprise because this release has unique enhancements around data warehousing that result in a much more comprehensive and easy to manage data warehouse.