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Introduction

Overview
Over the last few years, we have learned a great deal about architecting and designing business intelligence (BI) solutions; however that knowledge wasnt always easy to find and digest. It is still hard for architects and consultants to design solutions that adhere to proven practices for BI in general and Microsoft BI platform in particular. The BI Reference Architecture (BIRA) guide provides principlesbased guidance that is technology agnostic for designing your BI solutions, along with technology considerations to assist with key engineering decisions. The information in this guide is based on the combined experience and knowledge of worldwide Microsoft Services BI community and product group recommendations. The guidance is presented in following parts:
Part I, Fundamentals: Introduces fundamental BI application architecture concepts and terminology. It helps you to understand the architecture design challenges, and provides techniques and strategies based on proven practices to address them. Part II, Design: You will get an introduction to common architectural styles, its principles and how that will shape the design of a solution. Explains about how to systematically architect your solution into separate functional areas, design the interactions, and cross cutting concerns with the entire solution in mind. You will also learn about various deployment patterns and factors that influence your deployment scenarios. Part IV, Archetypes: Introduces different application types and their characteristics to help understand which application type is the best fit for your needs. Part V, How To: Provides step by step instructions for how to perform a particular task or solve a specific problem. Part VI, Checklists: Provides different checklists that help with the assessment of application architecture. These checklists are organized in categories to systematically help you with the process.

Microsoft Confidential BI Architecture and Design Guide is for internal use only. The intention to share parts of this guide is to provide early previews so you can actively participate in providing feedback to help influence the accuracy, validity and technical richness of the content. This current draft has not gone through all quality gates hence expect gaps and areas of improvements. Use track changes, add comments and send your feedback to birac@microsoft.com. The feedback that you provide will be incorporated in our Final Release (Jan '10).

Scope
This guide is not a step-by-step tutorial for architecture and design, but rather is a reference. It provides a frame for hotspots within the application architecture space. The frame serves as a durable and evolvable backdrop for key principles, patterns, and practices. While the guide is comprehensive, it is not complete. Where possible, the guide serves as a map of the space rather than an elaboration on a particular point. The guide does not aim at providing a single and comprehensive end-to-end solution to a problem. It instead provides concise recommendations to some of the most important problems you might encounter when designing a BI solution. While many design principles and guidelines provided in this guide are technologyagnostic, the guide does concentrate on applications built using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and deployed on Microsoft Windows 2008 Server operating system. Where appropriate new features provided by PowerPivot for Excel and Master Data Services have also been used.

Audience
Depending on your role you can use the BIRA guide as suggested, ITAP Advisors: Use BIRA taxonomy during assessment, discovery, and planning to demonstrate how Microsoft BI products and technologies can deliver real business value BI Architects: Use BIRA taxonomy, and frame and design challenges to systematically evaluate map Business-to-IT capabilities. Help customers to develop a technical roadmap and governance model BI Consultants: Use BIRA taxonomy, key design challenges, and solutions to map IT capabilities to Microsoft technologies. Enterprise and Partner Group (EPG): Adopt BIRA as a tool to demonstrate Microsoft platforms capabilities and differentiate our value proposition vs. our major competitors Partners: Adopt BIRA and use it as the foundation for solutions that they build to extend the capability of the Microsoft BI stack Product Groups: Use BIRA as a tool to understand whitespaces identified by Microsoft Services, to help them build products that effectively meet their customers business needs

Microsoft Confidential BI Architecture and Design Guide is for internal use only. The intention to share parts of this guide is to provide early previews so you can actively participate in providing feedback to help influence the accuracy, validity and technical richness of the content. This current draft has not gone through all quality gates hence expect gaps and areas of improvements. Use track changes, add comments and send your feedback to birac@microsoft.com. The feedback that you provide will be incorporated in our Final Release (Jan '10).

What to Expect from This Guide


Modular: Each chapter within the guide is designed to be read independently. You do not need to read the guide from beginning to end to get the benefits. Use the parts you need. Holistic: The guide is designed with the end in mind. If you do read the guide from beginning to end, it is organized to fit together. The guide, in its entirety, is better than the sum of its parts. Roles: Information in this guide is authored for ITAP advisors, MCS BI architects, and BI consultants (application and infrastructure), to make it more relevant and actionable. Job aids: The guide provides checklists to help you evaluate the architecture and design of existing systems, and provide suggestions for saving cost and improve efficiency. It can also be used to help make architecture and design choices early in the life cycle. How Tos: The guide provides a set of step-by-step procedures to help you with common scenarios that you will encounter in your BI engagements. Subject Matter Expertise: The guide shares insights from various experts throughout Microsoft, including Microsoft BI consultants from the field. Validation: The guidance is validated internally through testing. The test team checks for validity, accuracy, usability, and consistency using test case questions. Also, an extensive Field Verification Test has been performed by product, field, and product support teams. Externally, the guidance is validated through community participation and extensive customer feedback cycles.

About the Team that Brought you This Guide


This guide was produced and developed by the following: Core Solution Engineering team, Srinath Vasireddy, Skand Mittal, Alejandro Miguel, Siddharth Agarwal, Rakesh Namineni, Jason Hogg and Ratish Sharma Office of the CTO (SE, OCTO) Specialists in collaboration with contributors and reviewers, Fabio Bagatin In collaboration with Tom Freeman and Brant Zwiefel, from the Service Line & Marketing team In collaboration, contribution, and advice from Robert Skoglund, Jose Munoz, Jay Gore, Roger Toren, Marc Scott, and Rajeev Chakrabarti, the Field Advisory Board Members Product group contributors and reviewers Microsoft Services WW BI technical community contributors and reviewers
Microsoft Confidential BI Architecture and Design Guide is for internal use only. The intention to share parts of this guide is to provide early previews so you can actively participate in providing feedback to help influence the accuracy, validity and technical richness of the content. This current draft has not gone through all quality gates hence expect gaps and areas of improvements. Use track changes, add comments and send your feedback to birac@microsoft.com. The feedback that you provide will be incorporated in our Final Release (Jan '10).

Feedback
We have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the BIRA guide. However, we welcome feedback on any topics it contains. This includes technical issues specific to the recommendations, usefulness and usability issues, and writing and editing issues. Send us your feedback to birac@microsoft.com

Microsoft Confidential BI Architecture and Design Guide is for internal use only. The intention to share parts of this guide is to provide early previews so you can actively participate in providing feedback to help influence the accuracy, validity and technical richness of the content. This current draft has not gone through all quality gates hence expect gaps and areas of improvements. Use track changes, add comments and send your feedback to birac@microsoft.com. The feedback that you provide will be incorporated in our Final Release (Jan '10).

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