Application Platform

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration and content management. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s technology... more

The Visual Studio tools and the .NET Framework development platform received significant updates in Apr. 2010, including significant improvements for collaborative development and revisions to the Common Language Runtime application infrastructure.

SQL Server

The SQL Server software consists of a database management system and a platform for business intelligence (BI). The most recent version of the BI platform includes the following major components:

Reporting Services for design and distribution of reports
Integration Services for extracting data from data sources for analysis, as well as bulk transfer between sources
Analysis Services for online analytic processing and data mining
Master Data Services for standardizing data sets such as customer lists and product catalogs, which are commonly used in reporting
StreamInsight for analysis of large volumes of event data (such as Web logs) in real time.

SQL Azure offers a Microsoft-hosted data management service based on the software. (See the sidebar “SQL Azure“.)

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