Microsoft: Project REAL

Project REAL is a cooperative endeavor between Microsoft and a number of its partners in the BI area. These partners include in alphabetical order-: Apollo Data Technologies, EMC, Intellinet, Panorama, Proclarity, Scalability Experts, and Unisys. The business scenario for Project REAL and the source data set were graciously provided by Barnes Noble.

Summary: In Project REAL we are creating a reference implementation of a business intelligence BI- system using real large-scale data from a real customer. The goal is to discover the best practices for creating BI systems with SQL Server 2005 and to build a system that exhibits as many of those best practices as we can. This project is not just a demo ?we are creating this system for ongoing operation. It is a complete system, including daily incremental updates of the data, large multiuser workloads, and system monitoring. This paper introduces the Project REAL system, its data models, subsystems and deployment scenarios. It is the first in a series of papers which will give more details about various aspects of Project REAL and the best practices that have been uncovered during this exercise. Source and full article: www.microsoft.coma>