Just spotted this post on the Analysis Services 2005 beta public newsgroup by Mosha (who I guess is a bit too busy with other work at the moment to put it in his blog), asking for feedback on MDX changes and performance. It’s good to see that the AS Dev team are as interested in engaging with customers as they always have been, but if I do have a criticism it’s that beta testers would be better able to test out new functionality if they actually knew what it was. I don’t want to sound too negative here but for instance I know that MDX Scripts have changed a lot over the last six months, and if the only information you had to work with was Richard Tkachuk’s white paper (which is now out of date in a few respects), Mosha’s blog and BOL you’d probably be struggling to understand what’s going on let alone implementing any apps which really push MDX Scripts to the limit.
I’ve been lucky in the amount of access I’ve had to Redmond to get my questions answered – Matt Carroll and Marin Bezic, take a bow – but I know from talking to other people that they’ve been frustrated at the lack of information available. I suppose the onus is on people like me, who do have the knowledge, to spread it around by blogging etc. Unfortunately I don’t have as much time as I’d like to blog or answer questions via email (I also have to work), and in any case I’m under obligation to my publishers and co-authors to save the really detailed explanations of new functionality for ‘MDX Solutions’. Similarly the dev team, although I know they make a really big effort, are obviously more focussed on building the product than writing about it. Maybe the SQL Server team needs to recruit some full-time bloggers to pump the information out to the community. Now that would be a cool job to have…
