We had a very busy week at Project Botticelli, and there are three new short videos (3–4 min) available for you to watch: an introduction to data warehousing and ETL, working with OLAP cubes in Excel, and creating spatial reports using Report Builder. That last video comes with an article that discusses various reporting options, based on frequent questions we get regarding comparative advantages of Report Builder vs Report Designer, and the upcoming Power View.

Rafal has written a short article on PI: Performance Intelligence, and we have just published it today. He has strong feelings about the purpose of BI and its future, and if you are a BI practitioner you have, probably more than once, wondered about the reasons why our customers ask us to build BI solutions for them.

This is also a good time to mention new demo resources for those interested in Power View and the future of SQL Server Reporting Services. If you ever wanted to play with this technology, perhaps to build a Power View bubble chart (scatter plot) all by yourself, head straight for the hosted sandbox that contains a number of preloaded BISM models (read about BI Semantic Model here), ready for you to play with. This article by Pej Javaheri serves as a launchpad to five live Power View demos hosted in SharePoint. What’s very cool about Power View (and those demos) is that they work in any browser that supports Silverlight, though you need to make sure you are using the most recent version of it. You can create a Power View report in Safari, Firefox, and of course in Internet Explorer, to name a few options. Interestingly, as the future direction for Microsoft BI, and for SharePoint, lies with HTML5, it will no longer matter which browser you use in future. Below, you can see a screenshot of a quick report created using the demo enviornment—it took just 2 minutes to create, or you can see it happen in front of your own eyes in this video.

If you are following the news about Power View, make sure to read this blog from the product team, as it focuses on the functionality just-added in RC0, including the much awaited export to PowerPoint.

Happy New Year to all who follow the solar calendar, and a happy random-date to everyone else, and thank you for visiting us.