Description
ANALYSIS SERVICES 2005 WAS A SIGNIFICANT LEAP from Analysis Services 2000, from the concept of building your cubes in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to the concept of the Unifi ed Dimensional Model (UDM) with attribute and user hierarchies. The first edition of this book, Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX, was aimed at novice to advanced users and was very well received by its readers. Analysis Services 2005 was a large and complex product that needed a lot of fi ne-tuning to get the best performance.
Analysis Services 2008 added enhancements to the developer toolset and the server itself that made it easier to build your databases right with effi cient performance. The second edition of this book was written to provide insight into those enhancements and to help you understand how to utilize them effectively for your business needs. Because Analysis Services 2008 was an incremental release, the second edition of the book had a similar structure to the fi rst, but enhancements were made to each chapter of the book. The second edition was still targeted at novice to advanced users.
Between Analysis Services 2008 and the current major version, Analysis Services 2012, Microsoft released SQL Server 2008 R2, which introduced PowerPivot, Microsoft’s entry into the self-service business intelligence arena. PowerPivot’s goal was to bring the benefi ts of business intelligence (BI) to a larger audience with a simpler, easier to understand data model, the DAX expression language (designed to be familiar to users of Excel expressions) and the VertiPaq engine (which featured the speed of an in-memory, column-oriented database engine and state-of-the-art compression capabilities to allow larger databases to be memory-resident).
Now, we have Analysis Services 2012, which introduces Microsoft’s new, overarching business intelligence semantic model (BISM). BISM subsumes the venerable Unifi ed Dimensional Model and brings the tabular mode — introduced with PowerPivot in SQL Server 2008 R2 — to the professional BI developer outside the context of Excel and SharePoint. This release brings with it many questions about Microsoft’s direction in the BI space, and about how to use Analysis Services 2012 to implement your BI solutions using SQL Server Data Tools (formerly called BIDS). This book answers those questions and gives you hands-on experience with both sides of the business intelligence semantic model — multidimensional and tabular. We also follow the tradition of previous versions of the book in aiming to provide value to both the novice and the advanced user.