On the continuing odyssey to discover new ways to leverage OData services, I finally loaded up PowerPivot on advice from one of my colleagues (ok - my boss) and can only say wow.
There are some rough edges, mostly due I think to the fact that I'm overtaxing my "workstation" (a VM running with 2Gig of ram and 1 CPU). However, even in this constrained environment I was able to run through the tutorial - which includes crunching numbers in 2+ million row sales fact table.
The tools here are based on running SQL 2012 in an embedded mode within Excel (no need to install SQL tools - just Excel 2010 and this free add-in). So you get a lot of tooling to import data and manipulate it, as well as do calculations on it. This won't replace fullblown BI solutions, but it is pretty darn capable.
And, when you combine this with the ability to source data from databases, flat files, excel tables, AND OData (WCF Data Service) sources, this tool puts a lot of power in the hands of analysts.
PowerPivot download
PowerPivot Tutorial (highly recommended - takes about 2 hours to run through it)
Sourcing OData feeds into PowerPivot
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