Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 14. Populating Sample Data into Our Database

In Chapter 12 and Chapter 13, we discussed the history of business intelligence on the Microsoft platform and talked about the evolution of the toolset over the past several releases. It’s just about time for us to jump into the fun part: building our solution.

In Part II, we built a help desk manager application using Visual Studio LightSwitch. We ended that section by deploying the system to our SharePoint application server and our SQL Server database server. To build our business intelligence solution, we’re going to need some sample data.

If you have a team of interns with nothing to do and you’ve decided to have them spend a week or two keying sample data into your application, then you can skip this chapter and move directly to Chapter 15 where we will be creating our tabular cube using PowerPivot. If you would like to save some time and generate some sample data, then this chapter will have some great techniques for you to use.

Downloading Adventure Works Data from Microsoft

Dating back to at least SQL Server 2005, the product team has consistently released sample databases designed to show off the features of each major SQL release based upon a mythical company named Adventure Works. Adventure Works is a bicycle retailer whose database contains information about employees, products, and sales and is used to show off the transactional, reporting, business intelligence, and reporting features of SQL Server. Each release of ...