Donald Farmer and Kamal Hathi demoed Microsoft’s Project Code Name “Gemini” at TechEd 2009, which’s an end-user oriented Excel add-in that will let the user acquire data from a variety of data sources, including SSRS reports (SSRS KJ will expose reports as data feeds) and SharePoint lists, and load them in an Excel spreadsheet. The tool crunches data very fast even on a modest computer (the demo showed a notebook computer working with millions of rows) thanks to its ability to compress column-level data. This works because dataset column would typically contain redundant data. Once data is loaded in Excel, the tool will attempt to automatically determine the relationships between datasets (loaded in separate spreadsheets) to create a hidden dimensional model consisting of fact and dimension in-memory tables. The user will be able to manually specify the dataset relationships by telling the tool which column will be used to join the datasets (very much like joining relational tables).

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