Professional Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

The new features of Analysis Services 2008 make it even easier to use andbuild your databases for efficient and improved performance. This authoritative book, written by key members of the Analysis Services product team at Microsoft, explains how to best use these enhancements for your business needs. The authors provides you with valuable insight on how to use Analysis Services 2008 effectively to build, process, and deploy top-of-the-line business intelligence applications.

You’ll explore everything that Analysis Services 2008 has to offer and examinethe important features of this product with the help of step-by-step instructionson building multi-dimensional databases. Within each chapter, you will not only learn how to use the features, but you’ll also discover more about the features at a user level and what happens behind the scenes to make things work. You’ll get a look at how features really operate, enabling you to understand how to use them to their full potential. Plus, you’ll sharpen your ability to debug problems that you might not have been able to otherwise.

What you will learn from this book

• The basic concepts of using Analysis Services and the common operations you need to design your databases

  • How to create multi-dimensional databases (such as multiple measure groups, business intelligence wizards, key performance indicators, and more)

    • Methods for extending MDX via external functions

      • Ways to administer your Analysis Services programmatically and design and optimize your cube for best performance

        • How data mining along with Microsoft Office 2007 makes it easy to use and effective to perform analysis on data

          Who this book is for
          This book is for database and data warehouse developers and administrators interested in exploiting the power of business intelligence and leveraging the SQL Server 2008 tool set.

          Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Sivakumar Harinath was born in Chennai, India. Siva has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His thesis title was “Data Management Support for Distributed Data Mining of Large Datasets over High Speed Wide Area Networks.” Siva has worked for Newgen Software Technologies (P) Ltd., IBM Toronto Labs, Canada; National Center for Data Mining, University of Illinois at Chicago; and has been at Microsoft since February of 2002. Siva started as a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) in the Analysis Services Performance Team and currently is a Senior Test Lead in the Analysis Services team. Siva’s other interests include high – performance computing, distributed systems, and high-speed networking. Siva is married to Shreepriya and has twins, Praveen and Divya. His personal interests include travel, games, and sports (in particular carrom, chess, racquet ball, and board games). You can reach Siva at Sivakumar.harinath@microsoft.com.

Matt Carroll is currently a Senior Development Lead on the SQL Server Integration Services team at Microsoft. Prior to this, he spent 10 years working on the SQL Server Analysis Services team as a developer and then development lead. He’s presented on Analysis Services at VSLive and compiled and edited the whitepaper “OLAP Design Best Practices for Analysis Services 2005.”

Sethu Meenakshisundaram has more than 20 years of Enterprise System Software Development experience. Sethu spent a good portion of his career at Sybase Inc. in architecture, development, and management building world class OLTP and OLAP Database Systems. Sethu was instrumental in developing and leading highly complex clustered systems of Adaptive Server Enterprise. Early in the ’90s, Sethu developed a version of Sybase Adaptive Server running on the Windows platform. Most recently he was an Architect in the SQL Server BI team driving technology and partner strategy. Prior to Microsoft, Sethu managed all of Server development as Senior Director at Sybase including building teams in the U.S., India, and China. He is currently a Vice President in charge of Technology Strategy at SAP Labs, USA.

Rob Zare is a program manager on the SQL Server development team. He’s worked on the product since shortly before the first service pack of SQL Server 2000. During that time, he’s focused primarily on Analysis Services, though for the next major release of SQL Server he’ll be focused on Integration Services. He is the co-author of Fast Track to MDX and regularly speaks at major technical conferences around the world.

Denny Lee is a Senior Program Manager based out of Redmond, WA in the SQLCAT Best Practices Team. He has more than 12 years experience as a developer and consultant implementing software solutions to complex OLTP and data warehousing problems. His industry experience includes accounting, human resources, automotive, retail, web analytics, telecommunications, and healthcare. He had helped create the first OLAP Services reporting application in production at Microsoft and is a co-author of “SQL Server 2000 Data Warehousing with Analysis Services” and “Transforming Healthcare through Information [Ed. Joan Ash] (2008)”. In addition to contributing to the SQLCAT Blog, SQL Server Best Practices, and SQLCAT.com, you can also review Denny’s Space (http://denster.spaces.live.com). Denny specializes in developing solutions for Enterprise Data Warehousing, Analysis Services, and Data Mining; he also has focuses in the areas of Privacy and Healthcare.