It would seem that the DATAllegro acquisition is complete as Microsoft has shipped its first technology preview of the project code-named “Madison” to ten customers for their feedback.

Madison looks to be quite the offering, allowing for rapid growth of a data warehouse architecture because of its “appliance” model as well as integration with existing SQL 2008 instances, minimizing time-to-market. Customers have reported loading over a terabyte of data within an hour using Madison and over 1.5 terabytes of query processing per minute.

When you have a chance, stroll on over to the Madison Web page to read more about it: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/madison.aspx