Hi, MZeeshan

Sorry for the delay!

From your descriptions, I understood you would like to know SQL Server
Analysis Services capabilities. If I have misunderstood your concern,
please feel free to point it out.

Since this is a consultation type issue, you can contact Advisory Services
(AS) . Microsoft Advisory Services provides short-term advice and guidance
for problems not covered by Problem Resolution Service as well as requests
for consultative assistance for design, development and deployment issues.
You may call this number to get Advisory Services: (800) 936-5200.

Personally, here is some answers to your questions

For both 1 and 2, check the MSDN Online link below
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/olapdmad/ag
ref_4vlf.asp.

Services guys

on some of those standard > benchmarks? I checked the comparison page and
saw some of the videos but I am looking for some

To SQL's benchmark, please visit
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/compare/benchmarks.asp

based data warehousing

SQL Server 2005 is not public relased yet, you could post in the newsgroup
below to discuss with our developers
http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=sqlserver2005&sl
cid=us

Thank you for your patience and corporation. If you have any questions or
concerns, don't hesitate to let me know. We are always here to be of
assistance!

Sincerely yours,

Michael Cheng
Microsoft Online Partner Support

When responding to posts, please "Reply to Group" via your newsreader so
that others may learn and benefit from your issue.
=====================================================

Hi MZeeshan,
I see this type of question so often it is the #1 question on my faq page...
http://www.peternolan.com/Default.aspx?tabid=56

SQL server has come along quite nicely since 6.5 (which was a DW
disaster)......if you consider you need about 10x disk to raw data you can
get up around the 50GB of raw data (.5TB disk)  on a good sized server.

I did a 200GB disk DW on SQL Server 7 about 5 years ago now and it was fine
as long as you were prepared to work at it.....I expect that 2000 is much
better (but I haven't built one on SQL Server 2000 as I've been using other
databases).  I use 2000 on a regular basis for prototyping and a number of
my clients are using 2000 and they all tell me it's fine as long as you
don't want to do something too large......I am sure plenty of people trying
larger databases now on 2000.......our biggest problem was getting the
optimiser to optimise queries properly......the whole batch processing side
etc worked extremely well.....in fact SQL Server outperforms oracle
consistently in batch processing for the ETL portion on all the lower end
PCS I use...(low end being 2.6 GHz Pentium IV with 2GB memory.)  I do have a
2 CPU acting as 4 CPU 4GB HP machine I have been playing with with 200GB
disk in it and it goes quite nicely.

My own view is if you have 50GB or less of raw data you need to really want
to use the functions of DB2 or Oracle to be able to justify not using sql
server.......

My other advice is to build the DW such that you can move it at minimal
cost....that way you can 'keep the vendors honest'.. ;-)

Peter Nolan
www.peternolan.com