So I'm up in Seattle, attending the 2nd Annual MS BI conference, and day 1 did not disappoint.  Like a great number of attendees, I come to these events with a "show me something new" attitude. That desire was satisfied in the opening keynotes this year.  MS performed demos the upcoming code name "Gemini" self-service reporting solution.  Besides being a "pivot table on steroids" type of tool, it provides the ability to EASILY(I would have thought that was marketing fodder, but I saw it!), use cube based data and external spreadsheets etc. to create truly self-service on the fly analysis.

The example used was an HR team needing 3rd part market report for comparison to data within the organization's existing cubes/DW.  The Gemini tool provided the ability to easily associate the 3rd part spreadsheet to cube data and fast!  The demonstration showed 20 millions rows, sorted, filtered and more almost instantly.  This was from a $1000 off the shelf server.  These reports are then easily deployed to MOSS.

Ok, like me, many of you are already screaming - great, they're taking us back to a Spreadmart world.  Well the beauty of this is that you can easily report on which reports/resources are taxed from these deployed projects.  This will provide admins the ability to see which reports/solutions should be rolled into the enterprise data warehouses etc.  

There was also a lot of great info on Kilamanjaro (sp?) - this is the next mid release of SQL which set the world record for ETL, but I'll let Gus blog on that one.

While I know most of this if vague, expect more good things to come and I'll post as soon as I have screenshots or any more info on Gemini.  If anyone has any good links etc. please let me know