The Community Technical Preview for SQL Server Denali was made available to the public today. CTP1 was released last year at the PASS Summit in November but it did not contain any of the new BI features. CTP2 was released only to members of the TAP and SQL Server MVPs in early spring. CTP3 has been long-awaited. We expect that it is nearly feature-complete and fairly stable since CTP2 was not bad, considering the addition of many radically new features. Although, there has been no official announcement, we expect to see the final released candidates within the next few months.
SQL Server Denali includes several enterprise class BI capabilities such as Project “Crescent” and the BI Semantic Model.
According to Thierry D’Hers, Group Program Manager for Reporting Services: “One of the key scenarios for Microsoft SQL Server Code Name “Denali” is the continuation of our self Service BI story which we introduced in SQL Server 2008 R2 with the introduction of PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint.” Read his announcement on the product team blog.
SQL Server CTP3 can be downloaded from here.
Note: After choosing the language and platform, the download page contains instructions in a red block. You must download and install the download manager before you can download the CTP3 packages.
Additional support components are part of the Denali CTP 3 Feature Pack and are each downloaded separately.
Here is the link for the Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint.
