After all the years of working on enterprise Analysis Services implementations, there were definitely some raised eyebrows when I had started running around with my MacBook Air on the merits of Hadoop – and Hadoop in the Cloud for that matter.

It got a little worse when I was hinting at the shift to Big Data:

• At a Crossroads … from SSAS to BigData!
• Revelations – rolling the hard six to SQL BI and Hadoop

It sounded strange until we had announced during the PASS 2011 Day One Keynote which I also called out in my post Connecting PowerPivot to Hadoop on Azure – Self Service BI to Big Data in the Cloud.

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The reason for my personal interest in Big Data isn’t just because my web analytics background during my days at digiMine or Microsoft adCenter.  In fact it was spurned by my years of working on exceedingly complex DW and BI implementations during the awesome craziness as part of the SQL Customer Advisory Team.

Source: https://twitter.com/ftgfop1/status/213309905929637888/photo/1

The uber-examples of the importance of Big Data and BI working together include:

• Yahoo! TAO is the largest Analysis Services cube as called by Scott Burke, SVP of User Data and Analytics, at this year’s Hadoop Summit.
• Dave Mariani (@dmariani) and my session “How Klout is changing the landscape of social media with Hadoop and BI” – more info at: https://dennyglee.com/2012/05/30/sql-bi-at-hadoop-summit-awesomesauce/

The key theme of our session was simply that:

Hadoop and BI are better together

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Saying all of this, after this fun ride, I am both excited and sad to announce that I will be leaving the SQL Customer Advisory Team and joining the SQL BI organization.   It’s pretty cool opportunity as I will get to live the theme of Hadoop and BI are better together by helping to build some internet scale Hadoop and BI systems – and all within the Cloud!  I will reveal more later, eh?!

Meanwhile, I will still be blogging and running around talking about Hadoop and BI – so keep on pinging me, eh?!  And yes, SSAS Maestros is still very much going to be continuing – its its new home as part of the SQL BI Org.

Thanks!