How can I review a book properly when I’ve only had it a day or so? Obviously I can’t, but I can tell you the most important thing you need to know and that is if you’re at all serious about Analysis Services you have to buy this book. Quite simply it contains so much useful information which is available nowhere else I don’t know where to start: on the overall architecture, on memory management, on query execution, on caching, and so on. The authors are all from the AS dev team so they know what they’re talking about and are able to go into great detail. There’s also a lot of information here which is available in other places, on general cube design, MDX and AS programming for instance, and it covers them very well too; in fact it’s very well-written in general with plenty of code snippets and illustrations. I’ve got a lot of reading and learning to do over the next few weeks…
You can buy it from Amazon UK here.
Of the three books by Ed Melomed, Sivakumar Harinath, and Reed Jacobsen, do you have a recomendation between the three?
I personally would recommend mastering Teo Lachev\’s book before you even think about tackling Melomed, et al\’s. Unless you need really deep info on one particular subject.
Anyone else agree or disagree with that suggestion?
I think it\’s fair to say that this book is not a tutorial or aimed at complete beginners, so I would agree that it would be useful to read a book like Teo\’s first and spend a few months working with AS2005 before you tackle it. I\’ve only browsed through Siva\’s book and not seen Reed\’s at all, but my impression is that they are aimed more at beginners; for you, Mark, knowing you\’re fairly experienced, I would definitely recommend Edward et al\’s book.
Im looking for a good reference and code snippets for programming with the Object Model in Analysis Services, do you think this book covers that or what book would you recommend for this?
I\’m not sure there is one really good reference for the AS object model (I assume you mean AMO), but this book is probably as good as you\’re going to get. I would take a look around online for code samples, you\’ll probably find more useful information.