The Microsoft Enterprise Consortium, hosted by the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, utilizes Microsoft SQL Server 2008 suite of software products to support a broad base of academic learning and research interests world-wide. Over the past two years, thousands of faculty and students world-wide have accessed the Consortium resources for a wide-variety of teaching and learning activities and courses.   New server resources have been implemented for Fall 2009 to ensure strong performance for the anticipated growth in users.

The two major components of SQL Server 2008 R2 are SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Business Intelligence (BI) Development Studio.  Information Systems and Computer Science departments may seem to be the most obvious Consortium users but many other disciplines may also take advantage of the Consortium resources.  For example, marketing faculty and students may wish to slice-and-dice one of the pre-built cubes to demonstrate business analytics or any number of disciplines can easily demonstrate the power of data mining using the Excel 2007 interface to the underlying BI Analysis Services data mining capabilities.  

The Microsoft Enterprise Consortium is free of charge and can only be used for academic purposes.  Its Website includes easy-to-follow tutorials and examples to learning to do any of the following with a number of large real, world sets of data.

• Create database tables  
• Write and tune queries
• Create stored procedures
• Build and tune cubes
• Use Integration Services to illustrate ETL in the cube building process
• Add Key Performance Indicators and Dashboards
• Conduct business analytics using pre-built cubes
• Use the SQL Server Business Intelligence Development studio to develop and run data mining models
• Do data mining models using SQL Server’s Excel Data Mining Add-in