What this book covers

The approach we've taken with this book is to follow the lifecycle of building an Analysis Services solution from start to finish. As we've said already this does not take the form of a basic tutorial, it is more of a guided tour through the process with an informed commentary telling you what to do, what not to do and what to look out for.

Chapter 1 shows how to design a relational data mart to act as a source for Analysis Services.

Chapter 2 covers setting up a new project in BI Development Studio and building simple dimensions and cubes.

Chapter 3 discusses more complex dimension design problems such as slowly changing dimensions and ragged hierarchies.

Chapter 4 looks at measures and measure groups, how to control how measures aggregate up, and how dimensions can be related to measure groups.

Chapter 5 looks at issues such as drillthrough, fact dimensions and many-to-many relationships.

Chapter 6 shows how to add calculations to a cube, and gives some examples of how to implement common calculations in MDX.

Chapter 7 deals with the various ways we can implement currency conversion in a cube.

Chapter 8 covers query performance tuning, including how to design aggregations and partitions and how to write efficient MDX.

Chapter 9 looks at the various ways we can implement security, including cell security and dimension security, as well as dynamic security.

Chapter 10 looks at some common issues we'll face when a cube is in production, including how to deploy changes, and how to automate partition management and processing.

Chapter 11 discusses how we can monitor query performance, processing performance and usage once the cube has gone into production.