Customer Reviews

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

First, this book is not a tutorial. If you don't know SSAS and want to learn it, look elsewhere first and return to this book later.

What this book provides is an in-depth view of how Analysis Services really works. For those of us who spend most of our time working with Analysis Services, this book is invaluable for understanding how the engine behaves and why. You'll find details on processing, aggregations, attribute relationships, and virtually every other aspect of SSAS. The level of detail is exactly what you would expect from members of the SSAS team at Microsoft, which is to say it is very detailed and technical in nature.

There are five chapters on MDX that explain the subtleties of the various functions and how they perform. There are also chapters that delve into performance tuning, security, and administrative tasks. I highly recommend this book to anyone already familiar with SSAS because it contains valuable information not found anywhere else.

I have thousands of hours of experience with SSAS 2000 and 2005. I think that SSAS is one of the best (if unappreciated) Microsoft products.

I bought this book for one reason - it was the first one available. If you need one now, then get it. But be warned that it's not particularly good.

The key problem is that the authors are fascinated with XML. They use raw XML to explain a wide variety of concepts and tasks. For the authors and publishers, it has the benefit of wasting a lot of space. This fattens the book and makes it look like you are getting more for your money.

Unfortunately for the readers, the book is difficult to read and completely misses the point of the SSAS interface. XML is the underlying metadata structure of SSAS. That is the last place you should look to understand cube and dimensional structure, or for modifying how the cube works.

For a professional programmer (me), time is money and productivity is everything. First you should should use the graphical and tabular representation of metadata to manipulate the cubes and dimension. THEN, you write MDX functions when necessary. If all else fails, mess with the XML.

If you can wait a few weeks, there are two new books coming out for AS 2008. I believe either would a much better alternative to this book.

Don't waste your money buying this book like I did.

Regards,

Dan.

If this is the best SSAS book for the hardcore technologist, then I shudder to think what the worst one is.

I bought this book having no knowledge of the SSAS product or MDX. However my preference is for a theory-heavy book rather than a step-by-step introductory tutorial, so I would rather go straight for the jugular with the expert level book. To their credit the authors being deeply involved in the development of SSAS seem to know the product quite well, but their ability to explain concepts effectively and give you the big picture, enabling you to best construct an OLAP system with their product, is a bit lacking.

First, I'm puzzled how a book can go to mass production without someone at least running the text through the grammar checker--there are numerous grammatical errors throughout this book. The index also doesn't seem very accurate. I also found myself questioning the correctness of a couple code samples. These are but the first signs that the book was hastily written & published in an effort to be the first book to market on the 2008 version.

My second problem is with the ability of the authors to explain concepts of a technology that is foreign to people coming from the RDBMS mindset. MDX is an odd language, but many of their explanations & code samples often make the language even more confusing than is probably necessary. Let's take an example: in the cube-based mdx script chapter, they introduce the concept of static vs. named sets. They essentially explain it as such: "dynamic named sets are different than static named sets. Without explaining what a dynamic named set is, we'll just give you a code sample showing you the difference and hope you figure it out." While it is possible to then figure out the concept, I found myself very slowly reading the MDX chapters to try to both grasp the odd syntax of the language while understanding the subtleties of their cryptic code samples. Having gone through the MDX chapters I still don't think I know how to best use all the features of the language, and will probably only learn it by writing it.

Third, while it might not necessarily be the fault of this book, reading it makes me want to strangle whoever created MDX. Where is Anders Helsberg when you need him? This language is a mess. For example, we have a NON EMPTY operator and NonEmpty function being deceptively similar, yet different. Why not give them different names, just to make it a little less confusing? Also if the WHERE clause is so different from a SQL WHERE clause, why not call it something else? I get the feeling this language has gone through a few iterations to make it more SQL-like, and in so doing the original vision has been hijacked with "improvements" that only muddle it. My frustration with this book is it hasn't successfully enabled me to "get" the method to the madness of this language; i'm often distracted by its peculiarities.

One positive note, if you read carefully you will pick up some best practices, recommendations for optimizing performance, etc. It would've been nice to have a chapter dedicated to best practices, so if you don't have the time and need to skim, you can get the information quickly. However its there if you dig.

This book will not teach you what you need to do to make SSAS work for you. It will make you a PhD in what SSAS does under the hood. The author clearly hasn't used this tool in the real world, even though he is clearly smart enough to have built it. I mean, who really cares about the bit structure of how SSAS stores strings? He also spends a LOT of space showing you the DDL of the data structures you build in SSAS in XML format. Seriously? Wish I hadn't bought this book. It's totally worthless for those of us who have jobs and need to get some real work done.

To coin an analogy, if you were looking for a book on auto racing, this book won't teach you the first thing about winning races. But it'll teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the chemical make up of the metals that were used to cast your engine block. Hope this helps.

Don't get this book for any sort of introduction to Analysis Services, though it attempts to have sufficient breadth to have something for everyone. This book would be best for someone who has already worked extensively with Analysis Services for several years and wants or needs to take it to the next level, in terms of cube size and performance (both processing and querying), where you really need to understand what is going on in the engine under the covers.

Something that is rarely appreciated is just how open Microsoft has always been with respect to this product in allowing such detailed information on its inner workings to be made publicly available. The chapters on internals are the most valuable compared to other information sources that are out there.

It is true as another reviewer complained that there exist an unnecessary number of grammatical, syntax and spelling errors (the only reason I don't give 5 stars), but they are and I hate to say it, minor irritants compared to the valuable information presented. The other negative reviews I just don't grock at all. If I have any complaint it is that many of the internals details are presented so matter-of-factly that they can slide right by you without your realizing their significance or implications. They also could have included more on how the workings that are revealed relate to the many server parameters you can adjust and the many performance monitor counters you can utilize in SQL Server Profiler and perfmon to gain deep insight into what is going on underneath.

If you aren't already conversant with Profiler, get a good book on it too, like Mastering SQL Server Profiler by Brad McGehee - it's focused on SQL Server counters but it all applies to AS also. Profiler and perfmon are your friends when to comes to deep diving AS performance.

I also appreciated the chapter on coding with ADOMD.NET, a topic that many MS AS practitioners never get close to even with years of experience - it's a great quick-start.

I found this book to be extremely informative. I have read many other books on SSAS and I found that this book can tell you a lot about how SSAS really works. It also have an very wide and excellent coverage of topics which are seldom even discussed in many other SSAS books.

Mind you that if you are a newbie this may be a bit too overwhelming. However if you know the subject and want more detailed knowledge on inner workings of SSAS, then this book is a MUST READ.

Don't be too bothered about reviews on Amazon which say that this contains lot of XML based samples.... The XML samples are required, because the show how to use XMLA (Xml for Analysis Services).

All in all, this is the best book written on the subject.

For those of you who want to be the best at what you do, this book will get you there in a hurry. I am a professional consultant (MCS) with microsoft and I know the caliber of the authors (the most knowledgeable product people who built SSAS) and recognize the beginner book from the most advanced book. This is at the far right end of most advanced book. If you are beginner who hates XMLA, then please go get book for dummies or something and stop whining about advanced features showing here. I use this book for my reference as well as a deep understanding of the product internal. For those of you actually use MSFT BI product to build something useful and professional, this is the book for you. For those of you who are new and who cannot read very well, please find the dummies books, as those are for you.

OK, if you are a technologist and are inclined to write a book on a specific technology then read this most excellent book and see how it should be done. This explains everything about SSAS in finite details. I am writing a course on Microsoft BI and this is my reference of choice.

If you think that you know SSAS 2008 and you haven't read this book, you should buy and read it. It is the best book on Analysis Services internals on the market.

All negative reviews here are either about it being too complicated or not well written. While to some extent this is correct, I think that the positive sides of this book completely outweigh the negative ones. It is important to understand who is the target audience. If you are learning SSAS from scratch or even if you are on an intermediate level there are other books which will suit you better. However, if you are on an advanced/expert level and want to know more about exactly how SSAS works you will not find any other book which speaks about SSAS in such detail.

Considering that the authors actually _make_ SSAS the material is 100% guaranteed to be accurate and complete.

A must buy for everyone who wants to understand SSAS in full.

Through the first 3 chapters I felt like the book may have some promise. True, the brief overviews didn't really pertain to any major aspects of Analysis Services, but it was interesting to learn the background of the product.

Once I got to chapters 4, 5 and 6 I almost fell asleep. The author tries to explain multidimensional cubes with no real foresight into how this applies to Analysis Services. I found myself completely confused as to what was trying to be explained. My background is mainly in RDBMS, but I have enough experience with multidimensional databases to understand the core concepts. However, I am still trying to figure out what those chapters were about.

I agree with the other commenter who mentioned that this book is completely difficult to read and I say that it is not worth buying.