Spring 2010 - Week 4: Micrsoft Oslo

Before we get into this week's topic I am going to offer a few links for anyone who doesn't know what BPMN is. Last semester I decided to write this blog so that anyone who might stumble across it could read it and have some idea of what I was talking about. Since I'm going to make a comparison I need to explain what it is first.

BPMN stands for Business Process Modeling Notation and is used to describe business processes via a graphical flowchart. It was created so that people at every level of an organization could read and understand what a process is supposed to do and accomplish before it is implemented. (That flowchart at the end of week one's post is an example.)

BPMN is the standard for describing business processes.

Wikipedia page for BPMN
FAQ page by the Business Processes Managment Initiative

Which brings us to this week's topic, Microsoft Oslo.

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Turns out that "Oslo" is a codename for what Microsoft is currently calling SQL Server Modeling CTP (Community Technology Preview) and is part of a larger project called Dynamic IT. SQL Server Modeling will be included in the next edition of SQL Server. (ZDNet article about the Oslo announcement in November 2009 for the name change and it's inclusion in SQL Server)

Olso started as a larger project but is now comprised of a visual tool, code named Quadrant, for specifying views of the data, a language, code named M, for modeling data, and SQL Server Modeling Services, a database for shared, common domain models.

So while both BPMN and Olso are about modeling and have the same goal of speeding up development, Olso is about the data not the process. I'm not clear on whether they want all levels of an organization to be able to use the M language or not.

Here's three videos of SQL Server Modeling being used by Rockford Lhotka. In the first video he creates the object 'Customer' and uses the file describing that object to generate a form. The titles of the other two are good descriptions of what they're about but anyone who just wants to know what SQL Server Modeling should watch the first one.



This is kind of an aside but I question the neutrality of the Wikipedia article on Olso. It shouldn't say, "set of tools that make it easier", it should say, "set of tools intended to make it easier". Even if you put aside the need for neutrality they don't have any numbers to back that statement up with because it isn't available to the general public yet.