Who this book is for

This book is aimed at Business Intelligence consultants and developers who work with Analysis Services on a daily basis, who know the basics of building a cube already and who want to gain a deeper practical knowledge of the product and perhaps check that they aren't doing anything badly wrong at the moment.

It's not a book for absolute beginners and we're going to assume that you understand basic Analysis Services concepts such as what a cube and a dimension is, and that you're not interested in reading yet another walkthrough of the various wizards in BI Development Studio. Equally it's not an advanced book and we're not going to try to dazzle you with our knowledge of obscure properties or complex data modelling scenarios that you're never likely to encounter. We're not going to cover all the functionality available in Analysis Services either, and in the case of MDX, where a full treatment of the subject requires a book on its own, we're going to give some examples of code you can copy and adapt yourselves, but not try to explain how the language works.

One important point must be made before we continue and it is that in this book we're going to be expressing some strong opinions. We're going to tell you how we like to design cubes based on what we've found to work for us over the years, and you may not agree with some of the things we say. We're not going to pretend that all advice that differs from our own is necessarily wrong, though: best practices are often subjective and one of the advantages of a book with multiple authors is that you not only get the benefit of more than one person's experience but also that each author's opinions have already been moderated by his co-authors.

Think of this book as a written version of the kind of discussion you might have with someone at a user group meeting or a conference, where you pick up hints and tips from your peers: some of the information may not be relevant to what you do, some of it you may dismiss, but even if only 10% of what you learn is new it might be the crucial piece of knowledge that makes the difference between success and failure on your project.

Analysis Services is very easy to use—some would say too easy. It's possible to get something up and running very quickly and as a result it's an all too common occurrence that a cube gets put into production and subsequently shows itself to have problems that can't be fixed without a complete redesign. We hope that this book helps you avoid having one of these "If only I'd known about this earlier!" moments yourself, by passing on knowledge that we've learned the hard way. We also hope that you enjoy reading it and that you're successful in whatever you're trying to achieve with Analysis Services.