Customer Reviews

Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 (PRO-Developer)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

First, explaining many of the concepts related to Data Warehousing, data mining, and business intelligence would be one of the most difficult challenges to any technical writer. That's why many SQL BI books (dating back to SQL 2000) are so poorly written and lacks crystal clarity of many of the key concepts. Once I was done reading this book, I asked myself one question, "Am I a better BI architect because I have read this book?". From a technical knowledge perspective, yes. From a BI process (plan, design, implement, debug, verify, performance tune) perspective, I felt I did not gain much from this book.

This book would be a good manual if you do not understand some of the key concepts (Dimension vs Measure, Star schema vs Snowflake etc). If you want to actually implement a Snowflake schema, SSIS, and customize the results, the book was lacking. In other words, the book does not focus on the nuts and bolts of SQL 2008 BI. It gives you more of a 5000 ft overview.

It doesn't help that the book has a writing style similar to a college math textbook. You may need to read many paragraphs more than once to obtain the golden nuggets of information. In books such as this, you want writers to be blunt and forthright and not meander using sophisticated prose. The book certainly could be shorter than the 700+ pages.

The writers seem to possess strong technical knowledge of SQL 2008 BI. They have much to offer in terms of key knowledge and concepts. To put it into an analogy, this is like a book that describes how a car battery works but lacks information on how to properly change the car battery.

I think it is a decent book to get a start on SSAS, SSIS, and SSRS. Maybe not for the most experienced MS BI developers, but certainly for those with less experience.
In some areas it goes into a fair bit of detail, in others it doesn't. The authors push quite heavily on the Data Mining bits.
Overall I felt it is a bit too much 'marketing talk' in favour of Microsoft - could probably have shortened the book by 50 pages if they had left that out.

I recently completed a business intelligence project at my company that included things like aggregating data from various sources into a centralized data warehouse, and then processing that so it could be accessed through both an OLAP cube and a relatively simple relationship database. I believe the project was a complete success, and am very happy with the both the functionality we provide to our end-users (who are regular business people, and not just analysts) as well as how easy to maintain and robust the end-solution is. I think that last part is what probably gets most companies. They develop some type of data warehouse for business intelligence, but it is a house of cards that just continually sucks their time because it is so fragile or always needs to be updated to allow a business analyst to slice or view the data in a new way. I can definitely see how you could end up there, and I believe this book was the primary contributor to the success of our project.

I work for a small business (currently ~65 employees), and right now our IT Team has three members: 1 system admin, 1 full-time developer, and me (my time is split half and half between software and business management). None of us had any experience with OLAP, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), or SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) ... although I had sat through a few sessions/workshops over these topics at conferences. Although it is counter-intuitive (especially to someone who is a developer at heart), I have come to believe in the notion that the sooner you start coding the longer it will take. So, I knew I needed to get some more in-depth expertise in these areas before we started the project, which is why I ordered this book.

Before I even created the first prototype, I forced myself to sit down away from the computer and read the first two parts of the book (~400 pages). It it was eerie how much the content seemed custom-tailored to my current situation. It was targeted at a more technical audience, so the detail and depth used was spot on, and it assumed you had some working knowledge of OLTP relational databases so it didn't have to go over all the basics.

The book covers a ton of best practices that the authors have learned "the hard way" while implementing a ton of business intelligence solutions on the SQL Server framework, and most of them were not entirely obvious. The whole business intelligence area is still in its early phases, and there are a lot of gotchas. SQL Server 2008 has made some significant improvements over past implementations to help guide you to best practices, but there are still a lot of gotchas. The authors also demostrate an in-depth knowlegde on the new features SQL Server 2008 offers, plus then explain when/how you might use them.

At 624 pages, this book may seem a little overwhelming ... but I think it is worth its weight in gold. It is almost like you have an experienced consultant sitting beside you. If you are considering implementing a business intelligence solution, there are tips in this book will save you time, effort, and you will end up with a better solution for your business in the end.

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This book is a good overview for BI solutions such as SSIS and SSRS. For an experienced BI developer, this book is not a right pick. There is a very good overview on all the BI terminologies and covers information required to design, develop and deploy SSIS, SSRS and SSAS solutions.

For a beginner BI developer, this is a good book to start with. There is some help on BIDS which will help for a new BIDs user, connecting to source control, design, develop, secure and deploy BI solutions. There is a step by step help to create and manage ETL. The book helps to understand MDX core functions and few extended functions and a little bit about DMX (Data mining). More data mining samples might help a beginner.

Was expecting little bit more on Excel reporting (which is commonly used) and SharePoint reporting (which is more likely a future common reporting tool). Overall, this is a good startup book for beginners not a reference guide for an experienced developer.

This book was written for someone that wants to obtain a high level overview of Business Intelligence capabilities using the Microsoft BI Stack. The authors state that the book is intended to address a large audience. If you had a basic understanding of SQL Server and want to understand how the Microsoft BI stack is use to solve problems--read this book. If you want an introduction to working with SSIS, SSAS and SSRS--the examples are too complex. If you are experienced with the Microsoft BI stack (I am MS Certified BI Developer)--the examples are not developed or integrated enough to help understand building solutions. The book contains numerous examples, but there is no logical flow between these examples. Everything is based on AdventureWorks--a good understanding of that dB is essential to working through the examples. After working through a few chapters I learned a trick here and there, but my ETL, MDX, Cube and Report Design skills are little improved. I really think this book is best for a "Hands-Off" manager or Business Analyst that wants a high level overview of the BI Stack. The book covers BI from top to bottom and that says a lot. But, the topic is too complex for a beginner or advanced learning.

Like many books on Microsoft technologies this book is verbose. The book is 745 pages when it should have been 250 or less. MS Press ought to require their technical authors to take a writing course (and pass with an 'A' grade), or at least read "The elements of Style" (105 concise pages!). This book is tedious to read, and the screen shots require either 10/10 vision or magnifying glasses.

For someone with no experience with the BI stack of SQL Server, this book provides a very nice introduction. I esp. like the sections on how BI projects are initiated and managed and what pitfalls to watch out for.

Unfortunately, the book suffers from several issues:
- too much fluff and filler (esp in the first 5 chapters), e.g the fact that the ETL process takes over 50% of any BI project is repeated at least 3 times. When it was first mentioned, i thought 'good to know that'; but by the third time, i couldn't help yawning. Too many sections are started off with an uninteresting paragraph of "We'll describe A, B and C in the following pages, blah, blah". This is fine if it's done once per chapter, but there are too many such paragraphs that I keep skipping thru the pages to find what I want to know. Personally I prefer a book to have an info-to-noise ratio of at leat 10 to 1, this book seems to have a bit too much noise (maybe 20-30%?)

- Descriptions of how to work in the BIDS envrionment and SSMS are rather sketchy and sometimes difficult to follow. At one point, the authors event bluntly stated that "it's so much easier for us to perform the steps than describing them". But that's exactly the point, as book writers, it's your job to clearly describe these things rather than expect readers to figure them out on their own. Sometimes just adding a few arrows to the screenshots would help a lot, but I guess the authors think their time is better spent adding fluff to inflate the book's size than touching up the graphics.

- Implicit assumptions
The Adventure Works samples DB is used to illustrate BI concepts in the book, which isn't a bad idea per se, but not a single page is devoted to provide at least a basic description of the entities and relationships of the sample DB. Instead, readers are expected to know exactly what all the tables in it are about. Sometimes i could guess but more often than not when a sample table is mentioned in passing when describing important concepts, i feel lost and distracted and had to browse thru its data in the sample db to guess why it was used in a certain way in the book.

Overall i feel i've gained a lot of knowledge on SQL sever bi after reading the book, but it could have been a much more enjoyable read if not for the above defects.

I've found this book to be really useful to introduce me into the realm of BI and Analysis Services. This book is really complete and is suitable as well for the beginners to intermediate and avance audience.

If you need to understand basic concepts of Sql Server Business Intelligence as well as become productive as quickly as possible this is the book for you.

This is the best book I've read on the Microsoft BI stack to date. What makes this book a great buy is that it is very easy to read, goes into enough depth, provides "real world" explanations, and has a few labs/exercises to drive points home. Also, the discussion about projects from a Agile/MSF perspective are great.

I purchase about 8 - 9 technical specific books a year and this is one of the best I've purchased in the last two years.