I’m pleased to announce that, after a lot of effort and late nights, the book that Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari and I have been working on has finally been published! It’s called “Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services” and, basically, it’s a book about building cubes with Analysis Services 2008. So no surprises there then…
Why should you buy this book? There are a lot of other, really good SSAS books out there on the market, but we’d like to think ours is a bit different. For a start, it’s not a book for beginners and we assume you’ve already built a few cubes and know what a cube is; that’s not to say we ignore the basics, but we don’t spend too much time on them and as a result we can get onto the more interesting problems you’ll face when building cubes. Secondly this is a book with an opinion: we tell you which features work well and which don’t, how to work around any limitations in SSAS, and what the best practices are for building cubes; we make a lot of references to using BIDS Helper and MDX Studio for example, and not just the out-of-the-box features, and we reference a lot of useful material that’s on the net in white papers and on blogs. Thirdly, it’s meant to be a book you can read from cover-to-cover rather than a reference book: it’s relatively short, it follows the lifecycle of an SSAS project, and tries to tell a story; it doesn’t cover every possible piece of functionality in exhaustive detail. It’s not the only SSAS book you’ll ever need, but if you’ve already got a beginner-level book this will be a useful addition.
You can buy the book direct from the publishers here, from Amazon UK here, or Amazon US here. The table of contents is here, and there’s a sample chapter here.
Oh, and I should point out that this is a real book and not a hoax like last time…!
Congratulations to the new book Chris, Marco and Alberto.
Chris – I am reading it as fast as I can and all I can say is I am loving it! Very good book – congratulations!
I have added your book to my reading list. I am very much looking forward to reading it.
I already have a stack of reading to get through but am looking forward to reading this. I think a real world book on SSAS development and performance tuning in this area has been long overdue.
Congratulations to the new book! Bought it the same day it was announced on SSAS-Info, skipped through content and decided it deserves to be added among recommended books on my blog.Also, a great choice of publisher, the one with a nice attitude.
Congratulations Chris. Just bought it. Can\’t wait to read your book. When I saw it on SSAS-Info I thought: an SSAS book by Chris Webb – hmmm it\’s a "must buy"! Your name in SSAS world is authoritative/influential. It\’s like a few months ago when Irina-Alexander-Edward\’s SSAS book was out.
Chris,I am excited to see your Calculation dimension design approach. I’ve been using this for my Budget cube for long time and was suffering a lot for performance. Very recently I found a root cause of the issue but not sure the correct solution.Simple example is: I’ve got Chart of account dimensions along with Calculation dimension. Except Time and Scenario, majority of them are Parent child dimension type including the Calculation dimension. It has got one Real value and 145 Calculation expressions. I use “RollupColumn” property on Calculation dimension to use those custom members and use in my reporting. Recently I’ve disabled “RollupColumn” and hanlded all those expression in Report rendering side using “WITH” members and found that performance is excellent.Just with this change, a Report which was running in 4 minutes, now runs in 25 seconds.So do you know why was it killing my performance with RollupColumn? Is there any alternative to still keep my expression /custom members in cube space without using RollupColumn?Thanks,Ashok
Hi Ashok, it\’s impossible to say what the problem is without seeing your cube, but I suspect the problem is not simply how you\’ve implemented the calculations (ie either the WITH clause or the RollupColumn property), but the calculations themselves and the order they\’re evaluated.
I it posiable to buy a PDF version?
Yes, you can buy an e-book direct from the publisher.