Project Gemini: Excel 2010’s secret weapon

Hot on the heels of the Office 2010 preview comes one for the new version of SQL Server 2008. John Stokdyk takes a look at what's in store for business intelligence users.

To accompany preparations for the launch of

Microsoft Office 2010

, the developer is also putting the final touches to SQL Server 2008 R2, which was released for its Community Technical Preview this week. The full commercial release is expected in the new year.

SQL Server demonstrates the Microsoft mindset very well. A few years ago, the database was playing catch-up with more mature relational database management systems such as Oracle and IBM’s D/B2. But since the 2005 edition each new version has become more robust, reliable and added useful new functionality, particularly for analysis and reporting.

SQL Server 2008 R2

continues the trend in most of these departments. Microsoft boasts that the new release can handle data warehouses of up to 10 terabytes (TB) in size out of the box, or scale up to much bigger sizes with the use of additional tools in the pipeline - see the official website and

SQL Server News blog

for more details.

But for ordinary Excel users, the feature that is likely to be of most use is

Project Gemini

, an Excel 2010 add-in that lets you create import large volumes of data into Excel for analysis and manipulation.

Gemini greatly extends the spreadsheet application’s memory size and lets users use

native tools such as pivot tables on the data, which could be brought in from multiple sources or a SQL Server data warehouse. As part of the whole Office 2010 concept, the resulting reports could be published on the web using SharePoint. BI blogger Kasper de Jonge took it for a test drive.