In 2007 Microsoft announced a program of work under the codename Oslo which was intended to be a modelling technology and if you believed the hype this was going to be a very big initiative within Microsoft. By September 2010 Oslo was effectively dead (read blog post Update on SQL Server Modeling CTP (Repository/Modeling Services, ...

Here are some things that have piqued my interest on the interwebs over the last few days. Parameterized queries and Security in Data Explorer Chris Webb put a post up on the Data Explorer forum asking about parameterizing queries in Data Explorer and Miguel Llopis from the Data Explorer product team replied with some useful information: ...

As I mentioned yesterday Microsoft Data Explorer Preview for Excel has hit the streets and one new feature is a built-in adapter for talking to the Facebook Graph API: I’ve been taking it for a spin for today and was quite interested in its capabilities. Even without landing any data into Excel this is still a handy interactive Facebook graph ...

A short recap At the PASS Summit 2011 a project that existed as part of the now-defunct SQL Azure Labs was announced – Data Explorer. I posted some initial thoughts at Thoughts on Data Explorer and continued to post some walkthroughs and feedback. Data Explorer was an interesting technology to me which in October 2011 I described as: Data ...

I have been fiddling about with Data Explorer some more and have built an interesting little mashup that enables one to discover the number of Google Reader subscribers to each RSS feed on SQLBlog.com. Before I show you how its built I'll whet your appetite with a screenshot of the output: For brevity I have deliberately hidden some of the ...

Earlier today I posted Data Explorer walkthrough – Parsing a Twitter list in which I explained that I have been using Data Explorer for a few weeks now. In that time I have been compiling some feedback for the Data Explorer product team which I was going to email privately but I see no harm in putting these thoughts into the public domain, hence ...

Yesterday the public availability of Data Explorer, a new data mashup tool from the SQL Server team, was announced at Announcing the Labs release of Microsoft Codename “Data Explorer”. Upon seeing the first public demos of Data Explorer at SQL Pass 2011 I published a blog post Thoughts on Data Explorer which must have caught someone’s attention ...

To my mind the most interesting piece of news to come out of the recent PASS conference was the unveiling of a new SQL Azure Labs project coming from the SQL Server organisation that has the codename ''Data Explorer'' (not a very imaginitive codename I'm sure you'll agree) and for which there is information available at ...