Re-inventing the Wheel

[Darren Gosbell]

Interestingly I had two instances last week when I thought different parts of Microsoft were re-inventing the wheel.

The first was while listening to Episode 496 of Dot Net Rocks, where they were talking about project Trident from Microsoft Research. My first thought as they were describing the "visual workflows" was that MS Research had re-invented SSIS. Then as they described the versioned catalogue of workflows it sounded more like the way DTS used to store it's packages. But when they started to talk about how these "workflows" could be run in parallel on HPC clusters I realised that this was a completely different animal. Maybe this could become to SSIS what Project Madison is to SQL Server.

The second instance came via this blog post from Angus Logan about the Pivot project being worked on by the Live Labs group. I was thinking that this would be another tool along the lines of PowerPivot and Excel 2010 and thought - "Great, another data analysis project being worked on by a different team at MS. Why can't someone get the different teams working together." But when you watch the video it really does look like a different and amazing technology. While PowerPivot works with numeric data the Pivot project appears to work with images and textual data. It will be interesting to see if this technology ever converges with the rest of the MS BI stack.






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