SQL Server Magazine’s Michael Otey and Sheila Molnar visited Microsoft recently to talk with Donald Farmer, principal program manager for SQL Server Analysis Services, about the business intelligence (BI) piece of SQL Server 2008 R2, currently code-named Gemini. Farmer is from Scotland, prefers Donald to Don, and comes to BI as both a subject-matter expert and an IT and analytics expert.

SQL Server Magazine: Can you share your background with us and what led you to Microsoft?

Farmer: My background’s a bit unusual for Microsoft: I studied Celtic history, philosophy, and languages. I worked as an archeologist and historian for several years, but all the time I was working with computers. We started a software lab specifically to develop software for use in archeology. From that I drifted into doing consultancy, and I specialized in rural industries. I was in Scotland, so I ended up working in industries for the two valuable liquids that we export—oil and whisky. From there I worked in a BI consultancy that built rapid development tools for data marts and BI infrastructures. We were Microsoft partners, and it seemed inevitable to come from working on the tools to working on the platforms at Microsoft.

SQL Server Magazine: So you joined Microsoft to work on BI?

Farmer: Yes, I worked on the Analysis Services team; then I went to [SQL Server] Integration Services until we shipped SQL Server 2005. After that I came back to Analysis Services as program manager on the data mining team. Then we started the Gemini project. Now I’m working on the client tools for Gemini.

SQL Server Magazine: That’s a good lead-in to our next question: What do our readers need to know about Gemini, and what’s the relationship between Gemini and Analysis Services?

Farmer: For your readers, the easiest way to describe Gemini is that it’s the next generation of business intelligence technology. Gemini is in many ways Analysis Services. Think of it in terms of capabilities rather than technologies. The Gemini capabilities are what we call “self-service analysis.” Self-service analysis means that end users, information workers, knowledge workers—people who currently work in the Excel environment—can use Gemini to perform and collaborate on analytic functions without going to a specialist for advice. Now they can serve themselves and build that analysis themselves, and then share it and collaborate on it. We call this not just self-service analysis but managed self-service analysis. The important part of Gemini for the IT person is that we provide a layer of administration and manageability. So we give power to the end users to do analyses, but we give IT insight and oversight into what they’re doing.

SQL Server Magazine: How exactly are the services managed? And what does that mean for IT and end users?

Farmer: Let’s start with the story of one of the founding legends of Gemini: We were visiting a customer—a freight company. Somebody whispered in the IT manager’s ear, “You need to come and deal with a problem.” So the IT manager left for about an hour. The problem was that the cargo validation application had failed. What’s the cargo validation application? The IT manager had never heard of it. It turns out that this was a mission-critical application. Every cargo manager in the company was using it. The IT manager didn’t know it existed. Why not? It was an Excel spreadsheet. Somebody had built this application and shared it with other cargo managers. Soon every cargo manager in the organization had it. In fact, they wouldn’t ship a piece of cargo without it. And yet IT didn’t know it existed.

Gemini gives end users the power to build analytic applications, but when they deploy, share, and collaborate, IT can see what’s happening. IT will see the usage of any application that someone in the organization publishes. They’ll understand who published it, what the internals of that application are, what data sources it uses, and who else is using it. They’ll understand that it’s mission-critical. So IT understands that this is something they need to manage and control. But also maybe it’s something they need to secure, validate, and audit.