brucekoivu (10/20/2013)
Second Question. :w00t:My understanding is SQL Standard Edition 2008 is just not recommended for Performance Point 2010, due to lack of features and lack of performance.
Is there an SQL BI edition that will work with Performance Point 2010? Price Range? Is it 2008 version or the 2012 version? Can SQL BI edition 2012 be used to host SQL Analysis Services under SharePoint 2010 and Performance Point 2010? Any Catch-22's?
p.s. Koen - Thanks for the info.
My opinion of the BI Edition features was not real high. It was missing cube partitioning, so we still needed to keep Enterprise.
PerformancePoint was the first round of some integration of the Dashboards and ProClarity tools Microsoft acquired. Although you could build dashboards in SharePoint Std, the Dashboard Builder made this much easier.
Power Pivot has gone through a few changes, and can be used as an Excel Add In too. Starting in SharePoint 2010, you can publish workbooks using this, although the functionality is a bit reduced vs. local workbook. It is somewhat similar to pivot tables in Excel.
This allows large volumes of data to be presented in Excel (100 million rows for example).
Power Pivot is also a Server (tabular SSAS). Be aware that although things are real fast, basically everything is in memory.
In Sharepoint 2013, you get more functionality. For example, publishing a PowerPivot workbook, you can leverage the model in a Visual Studio Project for further enhancements (security comes to mind, as it is not available in plain PowerPivot). So if someone prototyped in Excel with PowerPivot, you can push this to SharePoint, and create a tabular cube from it.
There is yet 1 more version, Power BI. And Geo Flow allows some map visualizations to be easily created.
Sorry if this might seem a bit confusing - some of these technologies have been rapidly evolving the last few years.