Taking PowerPivot to the Enterprise

When SQL Server 2008 R2 was released in 2010, Microsoft hatched the idea of "self-service BI" within the SQL Server product stack and PowerPivot was the primary driver behind that position. A typical pattern with PowerPivot that I've witnessed is that BI developers or business users will play around with building data models in PowerPivot on a small scale, usually on their laptop. PowerPivot is simply an add-in to Excel 2010 that you can download free from Microsoft or http://www.powerpivot.com. PowerPivot takes your data sources and puts them into a column-based compression format called Vertipaq and generates and in-memory analysis services cube for you, without a developer needing to go into Visual Studio and build a complex SSAS cube with UDM technology.