Preface

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services ("Analysis Services" from here on) is now ten years old, a mature product proven in thousands of enterprise-level deployments around the world. Starting from a point where few people knew it existed and where those that did were often suspicious of it, it has grown to be the most widely deployed OLAP server and one of the keystones of Microsoft's Business Intelligence (BI) product strategy. Part of the reason for its success has been the easy availability of information about it: apart from the documentation Microsoft provides there are white papers, blogs, newsgroups, online forums, and books galore on the subject. So why write yet another book on Analysis Services? The short answer is to bring together all of the practical, real-world knowledge about Analysis Services that's out there into one place.

We, the authors of this book, are consultants who have spent the last few years of our professional lives designing and building solutions based on the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform and helping other people to do so. We've watched Analysis Services grow to maturity and at the same time seen more and more people move from being hesitant beginners on their first project to confident cube designers, but at the same time we felt that there were no books on the market aimed at this emerging group of intermediate-to-experienced users. Similarly, all of the Analysis Services books we read concerned themselves with describing its functionality and what you could potentially do with it but none addressed the practical problems we encountered day-to-day in our work—the problems of how you should go about designing cubes, what the best practices for doing so are, which areas of functionality work well and which don't, and so on. We wanted to write this book to fill these two gaps, and to allow us to share our hard-won experience. Most technical books are published to coincide with the release of a new version of a product and so are written using beta software, before the author has had a chance to use the new version in a real project. This book, on the other hand, has been written with the benefit of having used Analysis Services 2008 for almost a year and before that Analysis Services 2005 for more than three years.