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What is SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse solution? What is the benefit of PDW compared to normal DW architecture based on SQL Server and SSIS, SSAS and SSRS?

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Did you do any background research first? Most of us will simply regurgitate Google results... – gbn Oct 25 '11 at 9:24
Yes I did, but my intention was to ask for user experience and the benefits of the solution. Not just the info from MS marketing brochures. – jrara Oct 25 '11 at 9:44

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It isn't inexpensive. I don't know the price tag but you are talking large capital expense measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is an enterprise scale solution that is optimized for large scale enterprise data warehouses. As such, you may find it tough to get a great answer here other than things like the link I provide below.

You said you already did the research, so I won't provide you too many links other than the this one which does a great job explaining PDW.

If you have the budget and enterprise scale that requires PDW, you would be much better off talking to Microsoft and asking them for discussions with reference customers. This right now isn't deployed en masse, so you will get individualized attention if you are in the market for a massively parallel data warehousing appliance.

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Thanks for this info! The link you provided looks good! – jrara Oct 25 '11 at 13:12
It's not so expensive relatively speaking. PDW is intended to compete with the likes of Oracle Exadata, Netezza, Teradata. The price is pitched accordingly. – sqlvogel Oct 25 '11 at 21:23
Relatively speaking, that is right :-) The main point I was trying to convey was it is priced at the level that much more research and actual conversations with Microsoft and reference customers would be in order, compared to a quick question here :-) – Mike Walsh Oct 26 '11 at 1:01
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SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse is the MPP edition of SQL Server. Unlike the Standard, Enterprise or Data Center editions, PDW is actually a hardware and software bundle rather than just a piece of software. Microsoft call it a database "appliance".

It isn't a substitute for SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. It's Microsoft's answer for customers needing to process 10s or 100s of terabytes who want the ability to scale out large workloads across multiple servers, large storage arrays and many processors.

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