PASS Summit 2012 - what's new in Power View

This years PASS Summit for me is a bit different than previous years, not only have I been invited to sit on the bloggers table, but I’m also a speaker.

Yesterday there were some big announcements from Microsoft - there is a lot of really cool stuff coming out especially Hekaton which allows regular tables to be moved into an in memory data structure to achieve increased query performance - you can read more about that here.

What about Power View?

I you’ve read my recent 3 part series on Power View you would know that the conclusion I came to is that under it’s current architecture a HTML5 version of Power View is not yet possible - well at least not easily.

Last year at the PASS Summit Amir Netz demonstrated Power View working on an iPad and while  no announcement has been made for a mobile version of Power View, for me the biggest news was that Power View now supports multidimensional data sources (as well as pie charts which apparently was a highly requested feature). These new features are part of SQL Server 2012 sp1 and when I get around to installing it expect to see some more posts on that. Correction: Power View working with multidimensional is not part of sp1.

Being able to use multidimensional sources in a Power View report is going to make a huge difference in it’s acceptance. I know from my experience with clients there is still a large amount of traditional SSAS cubes out there, but aside from PerformancePoint there is no Microsoft solution for creating compelling ad-hoc reports. Coupled with Power View’s integration in Excel 2013 it’s now much easier to get your hands on Power View without having to go through the process of installing SharePoint.

So despite the current lack of a mobile solution, it’s clear to me that Power View as a product is slated to become the default reporting tool when working with SQL Server.