Microsoft has released the community technology preview (CTP) for Project Madison, its data warehousing solution for SQL Server 2008 R2. The CTP release stems from Microsoft's acquisition last year of DATAllegro, the original source of the Madison technology.

Essentially, Madison works on a "Hub and Spoke" architecture in which large tables are partitioned by the appliance across multiple physical nodes running separate instances of SQL Server. The result is the creation of a massive data warehouse that goes into the petabyte range. Currently, appliances ranging from 8 nodes to 20 nodes are ready for evaluation by customers who fit certain criteria, with general availability of the product scheduled for the first half of 2010.

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- check out this article at eWeek

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