Microsoft Enterprise Consortium
Hosted by the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, the Microsoft Enterprise Consortium utilizes the Microsoft SQL Server suite of products to support a broad base of academic learning and research interests world-wide.
System Overview
Thousands of faculty and students world-wide have accessed the Consortium resources for a wide-variety of teaching and learning activities and courses, utilizing large, real-world sets of data. Access is free of charge, and can only be used for academic purposes.
The two major components of SQL Server 2016 are SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Data Tools (formerly Business Intelligence Development Studio).
Common Uses
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.
- 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 Data Tools to develop and run data mining models
- Develop data mining models using SQL Server's Excel Data Mining Add-in
