I’ve been quite busy recently working on the second edition of MDX Solutions, along with the legendary George Spofford and two others: Siva Harinath and Francesco Civardi. I’ve only got a few chapters to update and one to write from scratch but it’s already dominating my evenings – yesterday, for example, I spent hours trying to get a complex CREATE CUBE statement working and found that the problem was a missing underscore in a column name. Argh! No pain, no gain I suppose.
I have to say that I was honoured to be asked by George to work on this project because MDX Solutions is the only AS2K book that I use regularly, and in my opinion there’s a real need for advanced books on Analysis Services rather than ones that try to teach you the basics. I had been worried that after his move to Hyperion (a big loss to the MS BI community) it wouldn’t be updated, but since Essbase now supports MDX we have the chance to add the details of that implementation into the book too.
Anyway, we are currently looking for feedback so that we can make the new edition as good as possible – we want to make sure it maintains its place as the definitive guide to the MDX language. Here’s a snippet of the post I’ve just made to the microsoft.public.sqlserver.olap newsgroup which sums up the kind of feedback we’d like:
Our aims for this edition are to: * Update the book to include SQL Server 2005’s new MDX features, and * Expand the content to include more detail on advanced MDX topics As a result we’re interested in hearing your opinions on the first edition: what you liked and what you didn’t like, mistakes that need correcting, existing topics that need more detail and new topics that you think should be included. The more specific you are the more it will help us – think of the functions you’ve had trouble understanding (NonEmptyCrossjoin is on our list!), the calculated members you’ve had trouble implementing and the queries you’ve had trouble writing.
So, please help us! If you could either post your feedback to the newsgroup or send it to the hotmail alias I use for newsgroup postings (onlyforpostingtonewsgroups@hotmail.com) then we would be much obliged.
Looking forward to hearing from you….
