Reviews for Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

1. Best SSAS book

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12rd, 2009

   This SSAS 2008 book is superb. For me it is, by far, the most useful book on SSAS (the second being Irina, Edward & Alexander's SSAS 2008, and the third is Teo Lachev's). I learned a lot from this book. The book is invaluable to me because in the last 2 years I have been doing a lot of cube development and in doing so I have discovered and developed some techniques or methods. And that was exactly what they wrote: their experience in developing cubes, plus their opinions and tips. Chris Webb in SSAS world is an authoritative figure and I consider his SSAS skills to be one of the highest in the world, along the lines of Mosha Pasumansky, Deepak Puri, Edward Melomed and Darren Gosbell. Marco Russo is famous in SSAS world because of his Many-to-Many Revolution, one of the very first things I learned when I started doing cube development. Alberto Ferrari is SSAS expert (I learned from him that materialized ref dim can produce incorrect results, something that I experienced myself) and he's a speaker at Euro PASS 2009. So reading this book is like getting the experiences of 3 SSAS experts. A book which content is derived from books online, i.e. the 'how to do stuff', is not too useful for me, as I can read it in the BOL myself. But a book that contains 3 experts' experience and thoughts, that's invaluable. And that is what this book is. Being a writer myself (I wrote data warehousing book on SQL Server 2 years ago), I can understand why not many experts want to spend their precious time to sit down and write their experiences in a book. Because writing a technical book is tiring and the money is not great. So when an expert does it, grab that book and learn. And this time it's not only one but three!