Business-Intelligence

Yet another book that I started re-reading last week (but haven’t finished again yet as it’s so large) is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed by Irina Gorbach, Alexander Berger and Edward Melomed.

This book has always left me with mixed feelings. The authors clearly offer expert level knowledge on the topics (as they were part of the development team for the product) but I struggle with the “readability” of this book. As an example, each time a concept is introduced, it is done so with accompanying XMLA code snippets, etc.I suspect that a lot of readers would be put off by the XMLA. Most people just don’t think in XMLA.

2011-06-21

I’m loving my Kindle. I seem to be getting through books so much faster. One book that I recently read was Book Review: Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning by Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari.

I really liked this book. It provided quite good coverage of PowerPivot use in Excel 2010 and also spent some time mapping the use of PowerPivot to organizational requirements. Marco and Alberto provided more coverage of DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) than I have seen anywhere else, particularly in relation to the CALCULATE verb.

2011-06-01

I know this post has the potential for religious-level debate but it’s time to make it anyway.

The more I’ve been working with Analysis Services lately, the more it grates on me that the BI community still seem to be the last ones hanging onto table prefixes. They’re not doing “tblSomeTable” but they are using “dim”, “fact”, etc.

Hasn’t the time for this long gone now?

Most of the argument seems to be about finding tables in a list of tables. You could do that via schemas if you really wanted to. But as Adam Machanic pointed out recently, from 2005 onwards many-to-many dimensions blur these lines anyway.

2008-06-16