Analysis Services 2005 Brings You Automated Time Intelligence (by Mosha Pasumansky and Robert Zare)

This article emphasize some of the best practices and decisions behind the design that Time Intelligence wizard does and MDX it generates...

Analysis Services has been redesigned from the ground up in SQL Server 2005 to provide the most capable business intelligence (BI) platform in the world. Analysis Services 2005 has many features and built-in enhancements that provide automatic, intelligent solutions to common business problems. Even if you're less-than-expert in OLAP or Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) coding, you can now create rich analytical applications.

The new Analysis Services 2005 time intelligence enhancement lets you easily create time-based calculations. First, let's look at how the new Business Intelligence Wizard makes implementing time intelligence easy. Next, we'll explain the "why" and "how" behind the wizard. Then, we'll analyze the modeling techniques used in time intelligence and examine the code that the wizard generates to show you several best practices for modeling both metadata and MDX. Because this article provides only a brief overview, you'll find this information most useful if you already have experience with SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services.

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