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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).
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).