SQL Server Magazine: When you manage mission-critical spreadsheets with Gemini, do you archive them or store them centrally? Do you use SharePoint?
Farmer: The end user works in Excel. Gemini for end users is an add-in to Excel that provides them with analytic capabilities. It allows them to handle potentially unlimited amounts of data. It’s an in-memory system. On my desktop machine, which is an 8GB machine, a hundred million rows of data is simply not a problem; billions of rows of data would be possible. So there’s tremendous analytic power. But for end users it’s still the Excel environment. They also get Expressions, a really rich expressive language that allows them to do BI-style calculations. For example, they can do parallel periods, and they can do contribution to period—calculations that are typically difficult to do in Excel. With Gemini you can do them because under the hood there’s a BI engine that understands these things. But as far as end users are concerned, they’re creating Excel pivot tables and pivot charts.
When they decide to collaborate, they publish to a Gemini server. The Gemini server is SharePoint with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Excel Services. We provide a very simplified setup that the IT department can configure easily. The user saves a spreadsheet, a workbook, onto that server. The data that the user created, even if it’s a hundred million rows, goes along. It’s embedded inside the workbook. That workbook appears as a document in the library. Users can navigate to it. They can see a preview of it. As far as they’re concerned, they’re working with documents. From the IT point of view, however, this is a very special workbook because embedded inside it is an Analysis Services data structure. So on the server, the analysis server can interrogate the document, load the data, refresh it, manage it, create the model, and even serve it to other clients if necessary. As far as the end users are concerned, they’re publishing spreadsheets and workbooks. From the IT point of view they’re publishing a BI solution. Other client applications and [SQL Server] Reporting Services can use that solution and build other applications on top of it.
Gemini is the constellation with the twin stars. To us the twin stars are the information workers and the IT professionals. It’s not just self-service. End users serve themselves at that part of the process that IT finds most difficult—which is answering a precise problem. IT still has a very important role; they provide the infrastructure. They largely provision the data. And they also provide the traditional BI. Traditional BI doesn’t go away. You need to have what we used to call "one version of the truth."
SQL Server Magazine: What is the BI professional’s role in this new world?
Farmer: The BI professional’s role is still mission-critical because they still have to provide that centralized system. BI professionals provide three things that self-service won’t provide—standards, scalability, and skills. If anything, the role of IT becomes more important because as users are serving themselves that will increase the demand for IT services.
SQL Server Magazine: Would you say that the typical end users on Gemini will be power users?
Farmer: Think of end users as falling into two categories: information worker producers and information worker consumers. The information worker producer is the power user. Here’s an example: I work on an Analysis Services team. There are only one or two people on our team who build the bug reports, project plans, staffing reports, and schedules. They’re the producers. Even on a team of a hundred analytic experts, only two or three people produce the actual analytics that are consumed by others. And that’s typically the balance you’ll find in any organization. Gemini changes quite a few of the dynamics in an organization. Maybe change isn’t the right word: Gemini reflects a change and clarifies the dynamic that’s already there. Self-service already happens. It just happens in an unmanaged, unaudited, and unadministered way.
SQL Server Magazine: What training do workers need so that they can use the Microsoft stack with SQL Server 2008 R2?
Farmer: I’ll talk about readiness first. To prepare for this technology, the advice would be upgrade to SQL Server 2008 now, and when you’re ready you can take the relatively small incremental step of moving to SQL Server 2008 R2. When it comes to training, our aim is to make it familiar out of box.
I always want what I call a Jurassic Park moment: There’s a bit in Jurassic Park where the computer system is broken and this 14-year-old girl sits down at a machine and says, "Oh! It’s UNIX. I know how to do this." If you know anything about computers, it’s one of the corniest moments in the entire movie. But I want that familiarity. I want people to say, "Hey! It’s Excel. I know how to do this." Same for IT: They’re managing SharePoint. SharePoint is the fastest growing server product in Microsoft’s history. People know how to do this. Analysis Services isn’t new. We’re not introducing a new server architecture. We’re not introducing new protocols. There are a lot of new features to absorb, but we’ve done a lot of work to make this a very familiar environment. And we want that Jurassic Park moment.