Enterprises today face the challenge of providing employees with access to diverse information sources. If they succeed, they gain many important business benefits, including the ability to make faster and better decisions. To meet this challenge, organizations are integrating, consolidating, and summarizing information from heterogeneous data sources and making it available for analysis. In short, they are using data warehouses—central data stores where information is collected, organized, and made readily available to users.

Data warehouses help users better understand information and look at it in new ways so they can more easily gain insights, see patterns and trends, and make better business decisions. Data warehouses serve the needs of an entire enterprise; in contrast, data marts serve specific business units or functions.

Building on the strengths of SQL Server 6.5, SQL Server 7.0 makes designing, building, and managing data warehouses and data marts even easier. It also provides better tools for gathering data from many enterprise sources, building a powerful query environment for using that data, and distributing it across the enterprise—even to mobile users.

These features make SQL Server 7.0 an excellent platform for data warehouses and data marts:

• Terabyte-sized database support. SQL Server 7.0 makes it possible to manage the largest data warehouses.
• Scalability. Gain the ultimate flexibility for the largest databases, plus provide access to central data sources, across the enterprise to departmental servers and even to laptops that use the 100 percent code-compatible Desktop edition.
• Microsoft English Query. Build Web or client/server applications that allow users to pose queries against a data warehouse using standard English.
• Integrated Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) services. Multi-dimensional storage and navigation support enables users to perform rapid, sophisticated analysis on large and complex relational databases.
• Integrated Data Transformation Services (DTS). Enables you to import, export, and transform data between SQL Server 7.0 and text files as well as heterogeneous data sources supported by Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and OLE DB. Now all data sources, including Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and mainframe databases, can be easily stored and accessed in a consistent format.
• Sophisticated replication services. SQL Server 7.0 supports data consistency in a distributed environment.
• Advanced query processor. The processor optimizes and executes typical complex queries, such as star query joins. Intraquery parallelism enables faster performance by breaking a complex single query into component parts, and then distributing the workload to multiple processors.
• High-performance utilities. Use these utilities for performance tuning, data loading, and index construction.
• Microsoft Repository and the Open Information Model (OIM). SQL Together, Microsoft Repository and the Open Information Model coordinate meta data from SQL Server databases, OLAP Services, and English Query.
• Visual Data Tools. These tools make it possible to graphically design and build data warehouse schema.
• Tight integration with Microsoft Office 2000. Users can analyze data in Excel.
• Broad third-party tool and application support. The Microsoft Alliance for Data Warehousing ensures that users can choose from solutions designed to work together for all phases of the data warehousing process.