Business Intelligence: Microsoft Releases for the BI Technology Stack (Timeline)

Business Intelligence Series

I started some years back to put together a timeline for the most important events happening in the BI technology stack (work in progress):

2023: Microsoft announces Microsoft Fabric (>>)

• Synapse Data Warehouse is the next generation of data warehousing in Microsoft Fabric with native support for the delta lake.
• Data Engineering & Data Science workloads with support for lakehouses, notebooks, Spark Job definitions, models and experiments.
• Real-Time Analytics is a robust platform tailored to deliver real-time data insights and observability analytics capabilities for a wide range of data types.
• OneLake provides a single unified storage location for all your data analytics needs.

2022: Microsoft releases SQL Server 2022 (>>)

• Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 allows to seamlessly replicate operational data in near real-time to be able to have more powerful analytics.
• Purview is a unified data governance and management service.

2019: Microsoft launches Azure Synapse Analytics service (formerly SQL Data Warehouse), a limitless analytics service, that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. (>>)

2019: Microsoft releases SQL Server 2019 (>>)

•  Big Data Clusters add-in for SQL Server allows to deploy scalable clusters of SQL Server, Spark, and HDFS containers running on Kubernetes (feature to be retired)

2018: Microsoft extends PowerQuery with ETL capabilities. (>>)

2018: Microsoft releases Azure Data Studio, a data management tool that enables to work with SQL Server, Azure SQL DB and SQL DW from Windows, macOS and Linux. (>>)

2017: Microsoft releases Power BI Report Server, an on-premises server that enables Power BI Pro users to publish Power BI reports and distribute them broadly across the enterprise, without requiring report consumers to be licensed individually per use (>>)

2017: Microsoft released SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), which uses PowerQuery to import and prepare data in SSAS/AAS tabular models.

2017: Microsoft releases SQL Server 2017. (>>)

• SSRS is no longer available to install through SQL Server setup.
• Python support added, R Services renamed to Machine Learning Services. (>>)

2016: Microsoft releases SQL Server 2016 (What's new, >>)

• Query Store allows to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues.
• SQL Server R Services integrate the R programming language into SQL Server.
• Direct Query for SSAS.
• PolyBase for querying the data stored in HDFS. (>>)
• Support for Support for HDFS in SSIS.
• Azure SQL Data Warehouse is GA. (>>)
• modern reports with SSRS. (>>)
• Real-Time Operational Analytics. (>>)

2016: SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition becomes free. (>>)

2015: Microsoft announces elastic databases SQL Data Warehouse & Azure Data Lake. (>>)

• Elastic databases allows to build SaaS applications to manage large numbers of databases that have unpredictable resource demand.
•  Azure SQL Data Warehouse is an elastic data warehouse in the cloud that can dynamically grow, shrink and pause compute in seconds independent of storage.
• Azure Data Lake is a hyper-scale data store for big data analytic workloads.

2015: Microsoft releases Power BI to the general public.

• Power BI Designer renamed to Power BI Desktop.

2015: Microsoft releases several Azure services:

• launches the SQL Server Cloud database.
• Azure Data Factory (ADF), a fully managed service that does information production by orchestrating data with processing services as managed data pipelines. (>>)
• Azure Stream Analytics, a fully managed stream processing engine that is designed to analyze and process large volumes of streaming data with sub-millisecond latencies. (>>)

2014: Microsoft released Power BI Designer unifying Power Query, Power Pivot & Power View.

2013: Microsoft announces Power BI for Office 365. (>>)

2012: Microsoft releases with SQL Server 2012. (>>)

• BI Semantic Model for SSAS provides a single, scalable model for BI applications.
• Parallel Data Warehouse with PolyBase capabilities. 
• in-memory capabilities. (>>)
• Windows Azure SQL Reporting service available (>>)
• SQL Server Data Tools unifies SQL Server and cloud SQL Azure development for both professional database and application developers.

2010: Microsoft released 

• Power Pivot as part of SQL Server R2.
• Azure SQL Database.

2010: Microsoft releases SQL Server 2008 R2.

• Master Data Services.
• Power Pivot & Self-service BI capabilities in SSAS.

2008: Microsoft releases SQL Server 2008 (>>)

• Table compression.
• Change Data Capture (CDC).

2005: Microsoft releases SQL Server 2005

• a greatly enhanced version of Analysis Services.
• SQL Server Integration Services to replace DTS.

2004: Microsoft released SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) as add-on to SQL Server 2000.

2000: Microsoft released SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) with SQL Server 2000.

1998: Microsoft released SQL Server 7.

• OLAP services & first MDX specifications.
• Data Transformation Services (DTS) for ETL workloads.