Project REAL—Business Intelligence in Practice
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On This Page
 | What Is Project REAL? |
| Download the Project REAL Reference Implementation |
| Project REAL Documentation |
| Project REAL Webcasts |
What Is Project REAL?
Project REAL is a cooperative effort between Microsoft and a number of technology partners in the business intelligence (BI) industry to build on actual customer scenarios to discover best practices for creating BI applications based on SQL Server 2005. The term REAL in Project REAL is an acronym for Reference implementation, End-to-end, At scale, and Lots of users. Find out which partners are participating in Project REAL.
Project REAL uses authentic customer data to work through customer deployment issues and to address the full range of real-world challenges that companies face when analyzing large data sets. These challenges include:
| • | Design of schemas—both relational and multidimensional |
| • | Implementation of data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes |
| • | Design and deployment of client front-end systems, both for reporting and for interactive analysis |
| • | Sizing of systems for production |
| • | Management and maintenance of systems on an ongoing basis, including incremental updates to the data |
Download the Project REAL Reference Implementation
The Project REAL reference implementation provides you with a working sample to build, implement and test the solution in your organization. The sample schemas, code, and architecture can be used to jumpstart the development of your own Business Intelligence solution. It contains a subset of the Project REAL data so you can see how various parts of the system work with actual data.
The kit contains:
| • | A set of instructions for setting up the environment |
| • | Guidance on how to explore the implementation |
| • | A sample relational data warehouse database (a subset of the Project REAL data warehouse) |
| • | A sample source database (from which we pull incremental updates) |
| • | SSIS packages that implement the ETL operations |
| • | An SSAS cube definition and scripts for processing the cube from the sample warehouse |
| • | Sample SSRS reports |
| • | Sample data mining models for predicting out-of-stock conditions in stores |
| • | Sample client views in briefing books for the Proclarity and Panorama BI front-end tools |
This kit will guide you through the key points to observe in the Project REAL implementation. Use it to learn and to get ideas for your own implementation. (While we believe it represents a very good design and generally follows best practices, it should not be regarded as the solution for every BI situation.) It will be helpful to have seen overview presentations about the BI tools in SQL Server, or read documentation, before exploring the kit. One good source of information is to go through the tutorials that ship with SQL Server (the tutorials are installed when you select “Workstation components, Books Online and development tools” at installation time).
Download the kit from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=68222. There will be two installer files (.MSI files) – one for the sample code and tools, and one for the data. Each installs in just a few minutes. Then open the “Reference Implementation Guide” document and start exploring!
Project REAL Documentation
The Project REAL team has provided content to help explain the parameters of the project. The following is a list of the documents available for Project REAL:
| • | Project REAL Technical Overview |
| • | Project REAL: Analysis Services Technical Drilldown |
| • | SQL Server 2005 Integration Services: Lessons from Project REAL |
| • | Business Intelligence ETL Design Practices |
| • | Analysis Services 2005 Migration |
| • | Project REAL: Data Lifecycle—Partitioning |
| • | Inventory Predictive Modeling via Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services |
| • | Developing Custom Components in SQL Server Integration Services for Project REAL |
| • | Project REAL Monitoring and Instrumentation |
| • | Using Visual Studio 2005 to Perform Load Testing on a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Report Server |
Project REAL Webcasts
Listen to members of the Project REAL team through webcasts that target different levels of users. The following is a list of the webcasts available for Project REAL:
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