Analysis Services Team Update -
Let me start with a quick confession ….
I could never understand people’s fascination with blogs (either reading one but mostly writing one). As such I never written one but …. There are two elements I do like about blogging:
1) It’s a great way to share information in an unofficial way ….
2) Considering blogs are very “unofficial” they tend to be filled with lots of bad spelling, and considering my spelling, I think this is an environment I can thrive in. J
However, I don’t have that much to say so I won’t be blogging, but I will use this forum to share with you some of my thoughts and more importantly share with you where we are with this release:
First, let me introduce myself. My name is Ariel Netz and I am the Group Program Manager for the Analysis Services team which as you all know is one of the components shipping within the SQL Server release. This one-line intro is very important for the simple reason that what I am about to say is relevant to Analysis Services only and doesn’t speak for the rest of the components in the box.
So how is Analysis Services doing with respect to the Katmai release?
In all honesty, things are looking good. In fact, looking very good (relative to where we are in the release cycle), so much so that it makes me somewhat nervous…
At the feature level, i.e. development of new features, the team has completed all of its planned work for Katmai – this represents an internal milestone we call “code complete”. The last two large improvements that were added to the product were Analysis Services SSD (Scalable Shared Databases ) also known as “Read-Only Database” in our earlier Beta release, and BIDS support for Visual Studio 2008. These improvements were released last week as part of the February CTP.
Code complete doesn’t mean the code is frozen and no further alterations will happen. We will be fixing bugs, we will be responding to feedback (depending on size of the change, importance and risk), and doing fit & finish work, but for the most part …. What you see in CTP 6 is what you get from a feature completeness perspective.
What else will you find in the February CTP release?
Well, the team has been working very hard on fixing bugs. Both ones found by our team and those found and reported from our community members, either in this forum or by other means. Fixing bugs is a tricky business especially as we get closer to the end of the cycle and we are getting very, very close to the end.
We see issues coming in (issues may be bugs but are not limited to bugs, we have also seen plenty of suggestions on usability or other ideas of how to improve the product, so I call them issues), that we need to triage and decide should they be addressed or should they not?
You may ask, “why not fix all of them?” – the ideal would be to fix them all but reality is that with any code change we make (a bug fix, for example, is a code change) we are increasing the chances of introducing new bugs into the system, bugs that sometimes are much worse than the issue we intended to correct in the first place. The question we have to ask ourselves is: “If we introduce a change, what is the likelihood that this change will introduce a regression in the system and how much time will it take us to figure out if we have a regression or not?” We, of course, weigh the fix against the value and risk of not addressing the original issue. As time passes, we are becoming more and more conservative and our love for risk taking goes away. In general, I will say that issues with broad impact and high severity will be addressed no matter what. Issues that are narrow in nature or with reasonable workarounds might be handled differently. Each reported issue is being discussed on its own merits. At times we do a great job making the right call on how to handle an issue and sometimes we don’t. Obviously we do our best to make the right decision and this is where I feel the community can really help us out.
It all starts with submitting your issues via the Connect tool. Issues reported by the community get a higher weight than say if someone in the team found the exact same issue. Why? Because issues found by the community typically represent real world scenarios where we know there is at least one user who ran into the problem. On the other hand, in some cases when we are doing our testing in house, we identify scenarios where it can easily be debated that “no one in the world will do that”. In either case, however, knowing that a scenario is real for a customer helps but it doesn’t answer the question of “How common in the issue in the real world?”. It is very possible a real scenario reported by a user turns out to be very narrow in scope and maybe it is better not to address the problem and instead work on an issue that impacts a broader set of users. This is where the “voting” system comes into play. As a community you can report your issues via the connect system and add your comment not only to the issue you reported on but also on issues that others have reported. The comment can be “I fully agree, this is a big issue that must be addressed …. My 2 cents” or it could be something like “yes, I saw same issue but it’s not a big deal …. My 2 cents”
Those 2 cents are worth a lot to us. It really does help us when we triage those issues and see what the community thinks overall. So please file your issues (don’t assume we know them already) and share your insight as to how important those issues are.
Ok, enough about that. What’s next?
After the February CTP we are expecting to release another CTP that is designed to be mostly bug fixes found by us or reported by the community. That CTP, depending on feedback and other evaluations, might be the final CTP for this release.
So what does all this mean to you?
In simple terms, it means that the February CTP is the release that you want to try out and test drive as hard as possible. It is feature complete, fairly high quality and it is possibly the last chance before the final CTP to get us any feedback that could be incorporated into the final product aside from critical ship-stoppers. Your feedback is very important and helps us assess our level of readiness to ship. Now is the time to provide input.
So, that’s it for now….. not a blog, just an update with lots of bad spelling I can call my blog post …. J
Hopefully this update was useful and if so, I will send another one as we get closer to the final build ….
Ariel Netz
Group Program Manager
Analysis Services
All Replies
Thanks Ariel, it is useful to have updates like this to let us know the status of things. Given your comments I just had to blog about it
Hi Ariel! The sooner you have a downloadable VHD, for Virtual PC/Server, of the latest CTP I would be happy to participate.
It is two months, soon, since the release, but I have only found the November CTP as VHD yet.
You could be a little bit quicker with this!
Regards
Thomas Ivarsson
