A quick introduction to BIDS & MSBI

So, after thinking about writing a blog for quite some time, this is my first attempt at blogging. I have gained a lot of technical information as I grew as a professional over the years, thanks to all the active bloggers out there :-), so I believe it is now time to give something back to the community. So here is my first blog as a quick Introduction to BIDS & MSBI. 

In the year 2005, Microsoft Released IDE by the name BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio) which was more like an extension of Visual Studio IDE to allow developers to design data-centric applications using MSBI technologies and SQL Server database as the backend. BIDS has been part of all the major SQL Server releases since then & is available as part of SQL Server installation. It has tightly integrated with Visual Studio .NET IDEs 2005, 2008 & 2010/2008 R2 installations. With SQL Server 2012 release, it is no longer known as BIDS but is now known as SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and is released as a separate add-on product.

MSBI Stands for Microsoft Business Intelligence. It is a complete suite from Microsoft to design & develop high-performance Data Integration & Analysis solutions using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) & SQL Server Database.

Typical Use of MSBI Components:

SSIS:    SQL Server Integration Services is an ETL tool (Extract, Transform and Load) which can be used for a variety of tasks like -

• High-performance Data Migration & Integration with Legacy Systems
• Automating Extraction, Transformation & Loading capabilities from OLTP Source to DW Solutions & Data Marts 
• Automating repetitive Administrative tasks like backing up a cube/database server, incremental data loads etc

SSRS:  SQL Server Reporting Services provides out of the box tools & components to allow a developer to design, develop, deploy & maintain a variety of reports for critical decision making. It also extends following capabilities -  

• Interface & tools to create complex Reports to provide Critical Decision making capabilities.
• Provide "Report Builder" capabilities to lesser technical IT workers group. 
• Full administrative control through the web interface
• Integration with SharePoint & ASP.NET websites
• Support subscriptions to send out reports to intended recipients as per pre-defined schedules & formats.

SSAS : Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services provides Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) & data mining capabilities for Data Warehousing applications.

•  Provides On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) Capabilities
•  To build multi-dimensional structures called Cubes to store pre-calculated complex aggregations
•  Provides Data Mining capabilities to analysis patterns, trends, relationships etc. within the data

Major releases of SQL Server since 2005.

SQL Server 2005 - October 2005

SQL Server 2008 - August 2008

SQL Server 2008 R2 - April 2010

SQL Server 2010 - Yes, you read it right. There is no released version of SQL Server 2010

SQL Server 2012 - March, 2012

SQL Server 2014 - March, 2014

This is just a quick introductory overview to explain how different components of MSBI fits together for any Data-centric Enterprise Level project. I will continue to add more blogs/information in coming days for each of these components which probably will be more detailed & extensive.

Please keep looking at this place for more updates & also do share your feedback & comments. I will be more than happy to amend/improve this posting further.

Thanks,

Rishi Saxena

References:

• Microsoft 
• Wikipedia