(This was originally posted to the NTEN Data Warehousing group list, by Nate Wilbert. Nate has kindly allowed us to publish his work here.)

I've actually been working with a particular set of tools in the Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing space the past 7 or 8 months. I've worked in the past with many different BI reporting tools like MicroStrategy (a ROLAP tool), Oracle's Hyperion Interactive Reporting and Oracle's BI Enterprise Edition (the old Siebel Analytics ROLAP tool). I've also briefly worked with others like Business Objects and Oracle Discoverer.

Lately though I've been working with Microsoft's BI suite for SQL Server 2005. Yeah, not 2008...yet. It's probably the best value out there for your money. When you purchase SQL Server 2005 you get access to the Sql Server Integration Services tool (ETL), Sql Server Reporting Services (customized reporting), and Sql Server Analysis Services (MOLAP technology). Respectively that's SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS.

They can be frustrating to use occasionally (well, many tools are I guess), but I think Microsoft is making a lot of headway by essentially giving those to you when you buy their database. And, they aren't just limited to Microsoft products. I've used (with some difficulty, but still done it) SSIS to pull data out of Oracle and SSRS to create a report that hits Oracle.

For each of the groups of people at the current client I'm at, they LOVE the analytic capabilities you find with SSAS. That derives primarily from being able to use Excel 2007, a tool they are already familiar with as the front end.

And, as much as I know I'm sound the Microsoft horn tonight (believe me, there are downsides to these tools...), one of the coolest things you can do it actually load your SSRS reports and your Excel data connections (to X number of cubes you create) into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server where everyone who uses your internal site can access them. For the end user, it's as easy as going to a website and clicking the excel file which they open and use in pivot table like formats. You can create charts off that...anything you can do in normal Excel except that this is on steroids because you can access a data warehouse on the backend.

Hopefully that makes some sense. My thought was that many nonprofits can get Microsoft SQL Server severely discounted or maybe even free in some cases and that with that comes the power of these BI / DW tools. I'm not sure if anyone is using SharePoint, but if so, these tools link together (fairly) well.

One of my biggest concerns about the tools is that I think they are somewhat complex and buggy. But that gets back to the whole "value" proposition. When you get these items "free" with your database purchase, it's hard to knock them too much.

I'd be interested in know if anyone out there has SQL Server and if they plan on using these tools.