Business Intelligence Mark-up Language (BIML) is a technology that allows business intelligence assets to be defined in the Microsoft space by XML script. This is in contrast to the visual development environments of BIDS and SSDT which require manual creation of components through a drag and drop canvas.

Perhaps that's no so impressive (after all Microsoft projects are a domain specific XML dialect anyway), but what BIML allows developers to do is inject the XML with programmatic code and this delivers a multitude of benefits which include;

• Automatic generation of assets based on meta-data
• Code reuse
• Low development time
• Reproducible outcomes
• Policy and standards management ensuring assets conform to a best practice standards
• Streamlined and managed version changes