July 21, 2009. New book released - Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services
July 21, 2009. New book released - Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services by Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari, Chris Webb.
Amazon links: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada. You can also buy e-book or hardcopy from publisher PacktPub.
Sample Chapter no. 4 "Measures and Measure Groups"
This is a practical tutorial for Analysis Services that shows readers how to solve problems commonly encountered while designing cubes, and explains which features of Analysis Services work well and which should be avoided. The book walks through the whole cube development lifecycle, from building dimensions, cubes and calculations to tuning and moving the cube into production.
This book is aimed at Analysis Services developers who already have some experience but who want to go into more detail on advanced topics, and who want to learn best practices for cube design.
What you will learn from this book?
- Build a data mart suitable for use with Analysis Services
- Create and configure an Analysis Services project in Business Intelligence Development Studio
- Use the Dimension Wizard and the Dimension Editor to build dimensions
- Create measure groups and associate them with dimensions
- Add calculations to the cube, including implementing currency conversion and a date tool dimension
- Explore the security model, including dimension security and cell security, and implement dynamic security
- Tune queries to get the best possible performance
- Automate processing and partition creation
- Monitor your cube to see who's actually using it
A note from Vidas Matelis: This is a very good book that is without a doubt a "must read" for all SSAS developers. It has a lot of notes from the "real world" that would have saved me days or weeks in my SSAS database development. Other books tells you "what SSAS can do for you". This book explains "how can you do this with SSAS". Again, I am rating this as a "must read".