On the heels of the latest development milestone of SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft also made available for download a new testing build of the project formerly codenamed Gemini. Just a week after SQL Server 2008 R2 November Community Technology Preview went live on the Microsoft Download Center, the latest CTP of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 - PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 was also offered to early adopters.

“PowerPivot for Excel provides non-expert BI users the ability to create powerful BI solutions using Excel. PowerPivot for SharePoint facilitates the online hosting, sharing and collaboration of these BI solutions in SharePoint while providing the IT department greater visibility and manageability,” revealed a member of the Microsoft SQL Server team.

According to the official description accompanying the download, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is designed to streamline the manipulation of large data sets. The tool can handle multiple millions of rows, and that customers will have the option to easily share conclusions and the analysis of the information via SharePoint 2010. The best thing about PowerPivot, according to the software giant, is that it works in conjunction with a product that customers are bound to already be familiar with, Excel. It is with Excel 2010 that users will be able to comb through large quantities of data and extract conclusions in matters of seconds.

Microsoft underlined that customers “can:

- Process millions of rows with about the same performance as few hundred rows using by leveraging PowerPivot in-memory engine and efficient compression algorithms
- Integrate data from a multitude of sources, including corporate databases, spreadsheets, reports, text files, and Internet data feeds.
- Go beyond standard Excel expressions and use PowerPivot’s Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) to perform powerful data manipulations. Follow relationships between tables as in a database and define sophisticated calculations using familiar and intuitive expressions.
- Interactively explore, analyze, and create reports without depending on expert knowledge and specialty training by using native Excel 2010 functionality such as PivotTables, slicers, and other familiar analysis features.”

SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP is available for download here.
Office 2010 Beta 14.0.4536.1000 is available for download here.