Another Project Crescent movie which show the new features.

Last month I blogged about a perfect movie about Project Crescent. Movies are a great way to show what your product can do. I'm very enthousiastic about Project Crescent and found a new movie which will show more Crescent functionality. This movie will talk about:

• Crescent design environment
• Crescent visualizations overview
• Converting a table to a matrix
• Converting a table to a card
• Why icons are disabled sometimes
• Charts with series
• Bubble charts
• Filtering vs highlighting
• Slicers versus filters
• Tiles

Enjoy it.

Is SQL Server coming in a yearly release cycle

As mentioned in my earlier post, SQL Server 2008 R2 will come commercial available in May 2010. It looks like every new SQL server release is coming sooner and sooner.
We have had SQL 2000,
5 years later SQL 2005,
3 years later SQL 2008,
2 years later SQL 2008 R2 and now it looks like
1 year later SQL 2011 codename 'Denali'.

On the Microsoft Blog MSDN site of SQL Server Releases an overview is giving of the different SQL Server related dates. The support for SQL 2005 will enter into extended support on 13 april 2011. Based on this date and the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy, I expect that there is a big chance that the new SQL server version is planned for commercial release around this date. Microsoft is starting a new trend to come with new releases much earlier as in the past. See for instance the rumors about Windows 8.

Will this become a new trend in the release cycles of Microsoft?  Let see what will happen in the coming years.