SQL Server to run 270TB Multi-node Data Warehouse

Computerworld are reporting that Microsoft are working on a massive data warehousing project for an external client, in an obvious aim to dispel the idea that SQL Server is a lightweight platform. From the article:

At the annual conference of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) user group, Microsoft said it is designing a 270TB multinode data warehouse for a foreign (ie. non-US) government that it declined to identify. The software vendor is also working on a 162TB single-node installation for its own marketing department.

Of course, this doesn't explain how Microsoft are doing this (any tweaks under the hood?), or whether the warehouse itself will be of any use (no metrics on reporting, data mining, etc. throughput - and we all know how Microsoft are on benchmarking *wink*). Still, I quite like SQL Server (and the MS BI tool suite) as a product, and it has singlehandedly been responsible for the biggest shakeup in the BI industry in the past several decades (a much needed one at that). If this kind of data volume can be handled well by SQL Server 2005, as configured by your average corporate DBA, then Oracle and IBM are really going to be looking over their shoulders.

The inmates and the asylum.

Listening to your customers (or end-users) is a must for BI systems, or any system for that matter, right? If the users tell you they want a feature you should give it to them - and quickly if possible. Well, no. We often talk in our lectures that the role of an analyst in a decision support setting should be - what we call - an active one. The analyst shouldn't just be a passive interpreter of the user's requirements, translating everything the user's ask for into system designs. They need to take into account what the user community wants, but every now and again they need to intervene and change something. They might need to explain a better way of doing things, or explain that what the users are asking for is silly is somehow or another. All this takes great skill and care not to seem like a typical know it all IT person.

Here is an unusual example of taking what your user community wants too far - and sadly this is going to have a major impact on just about everybody working in BI. There is a feature in the upcoming version of Excel that is just plain wrong.

Microsoft has gone out of its way with its next release of office to take usability seriously. They have tried to embark on a brave remake of the product set. One of the potentially great new features they are including in Excel is the ability to quickly create bar charts that sit (ala Tufte's sparklines) in the spreadsheet cells, next to the numbers and text, not as a separate chart object. Great idea. However, the feedback they got from focus groups is that users don't like the look of these charts when one of the cells is 0 or very low compared to the others, so they have adjusted the bars displayed so there is a minimum that shows even when the quantity is 0. Oh dear. For some example charts and a discussion visit the (excellent) blog at Juice Analytics.