Customer Reviews

Microsoft® SQL Server(TM) 2000 Analysis Services Step by Step (DV-DLT Fundamentals)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This Step by Step guide serves as a great starting point for getting familiar with Microsoft's Analysis services. It starts with a quick introduction to data warehousing (without resorting to giving an entire history of the subject, as seems so common today) and how it relates to OLAP and then moves right into the Analysis Servies tools.

The chapters are well written and get you the information you need, without missing any major details. Even if you don't plan to take the "step by step" approach, this book is worth having by your side.

All right... now for the downsides. At best this book is good for beginners. These are some of the areas where I found it came up short:

- Sizing systems that will support Analysis Services. The book talks a bit about how big cubes are, but there is no information about cube performance/cube sizing, etc. Basically, this book won't help you develop a hardware plan for hosting Analysis Services.

- Accessing Analysis Services via the web. All of Microsoft's literature talks about how SQL Server 2000's great support for the web/XML. Strangely, it is very hard to find this information for Analysis Services, and this book doesn't provide any guidance. Right now it seems that the best you can do to find this information is hunt around Microsoft's site.

Overall I still think this is good book. However, if you are going to be building a large Analysis Services system, expect to be looking for other sources to answer all of your questions.

This book is very basic and should provide a good foundation for those people who are not familiar with SQL 7's OLAP or the newer implementation called 'analysis services'.

It is easy to read, the examples on the cd work perfectly and the tutorials provide a good overview of how to create your own cubes.

It's pretty thin and after reading through the first few chapters I found myself putting it down and just diving into designing my own stuff with microsoft's interface. It's a very logical application and with little or no resource materials people could easily figure this out with the tutorials included with the software.

This is not a good reference book, though I'm at a loss as to what would be a decent reference book on this subject since it's one of those things you either know or you don't.

MDX is VERY thin, and since you can teach the basics to yourself, a reference/primer book on MDX may suit you better.

This book shows some basic examples by mousing through the menus with a pre-cooked script, but the on-line tutorial does about the same thing. However, there are no explanations why one would select one option over another, no explanations about how to construct different cubes to solve problems and no explanations about the syntax of Analysis services. There is no overriding theory presented that allows one to gain an understanding about how to frame and solve problems using Analysis services nor about what kinds of problems can and can't be solved. After reading the book I have a high level understanding about potentially what can be done, but I have not gained enough information to build anything useful.

Not only is this book useful, it has the added advantage of being well written. I picked it up after spending a few days wandering around in Books On Line and reading Erik Thomsen's book for some theoretical background. This book was a great help to bringing all the various aspect of OLAP objects together in the specific context of MS Analysis Services.

After I purchased the book I noticed the one-star reviews given by two readers. They did not do anyone any favors with those reviews. One reviewer admits he did not read beyond the first chapter, and the other complains that custom rollups and unary operators are never mentioned in the book. Apparently he never got to page 105, where both are discussed. I think you are safe to ignore those jokers.

Enjoy 'Step by Step' for what it is. If you want more on MDX, be prepared to buy another book - I recommend Spofford.

A really great book for someone wanting to come to grips with the SQL Server OLAP or Analysis Services. The book takes one through the processes of creating cubes and reporting from them, in a step by step, orderly manner. The book was recommended by several attendees at the recent PASS conference in San Francisco. I bought the book and installed the analytic services on an NT server and have been working with it for the past 10 days. The reading is easy and helps one come up to speed in an efficient and effective manner. For a beginner or some one with some OLAP product training, the book is really great.

This is a great OLAP book for SQL SERVER 2000 Analysis Services. It covers ROLAP, MOLAP, and HOLAP. The book is filled with pictures and easy to understand examples to help you learn SQL Server 2000 OLAP features. It is great for people with no OLAP knowledge who want to learn about OLAP and SQL Server 2000 OLAP potential. In addition, this book is great for experienced OLAP developers who want to learn new features of SQL SERVER 2000 Analysis Services.

The best book to learn OLAP for SQL SERVER 2000 and to get up to speed with the new OLAP feautures in SQL SERVER 2000.

I recently bought this book and have read about 7 chapters. The book is useful to get hands-on experience on how the Analysis Manager works. How can you use it to make basic cubes, dimensions etc. Also, there is a couple of chapters on MDX and the MDX sample application that comes with Analysis Services. In general I found the book useful because it made me familiar with the UI of Analysis Manager, but reading the book was hard. True to its name "Step by Step" the book focuses on "How to do things" (like click here , click there, heres the screen shot you should expect to see) without explaining in ANY detail about why you are doing what you are doing. There is no gradual build-up of concepts. If a chapter says it will take you 2.5 hours to complete, it will take that much time because of the step-by-step nature. I personally find this approach hard to follow. I would have liked if the book devoted a few pages in the beginnign of the chapter explaining the concepts and then went on to show you how to do this with the analysis manager.

After digging thru most SQL Server DBA books without finding much if any coverage of how to build an OLAP solution for Data Warehousing I found this text to be perfect for my transition to building my MOLAP data warehouse with SQL Server 2000 from Oracle data warehousing. Granted the book is not perfect but where else can you learn how Analysis Services 2000 and building an OLAP solution on MS SQL Server? The only other texts that even cover it are the MS SQL Server 2000 Resource Kit (also quite good book too with great tools on CDROM) and the MS SQL Server 2000 Reference Library (another must have for hardcore DBAs like me). You will be up and running a starter OLAP solution in no time flat.

This is a good book that will help you get started on Microsoft's SQL Server Analysis Services.
You'll get to learn how to build a Cube, build a Dimension and the different types of Measures.
You'll learn how to determine the type of dimensions you have.
You'll learn how to do some basic tricks.

But you won't learn any of the advanced topics that I was hoping for.
This book doesn't go into any details about how historical data is handled.
How to do some basic MDX programming.
How to make custom incremental cube processing.
etc.

This is a beginner's book, as the title suggests, that will take you from clueless to comfortable in Analysis Services in a short period of time.

That's why I gave it 4 stars.

This book in no way substitutes a good book on OLAP and/or data warehousing (such as Kimbal's books).

The book covers Analysis Services quite well if you are willing to go through the steps that they have for each section. As the name implies it steps you through examples and is NOT a reference guide by any means. It is also not a step by step guide that you can just read. You must be working through the examples while you read or you will get lost pretty fast because many examples build on previous ones. Their coverage of MDX is fairly weak unless you need exactly what they query on. Other than that they cover the topics pretty well.