This Step by Step guide serves as a great starting point for getting familiar with Microsoft's Analysis services. It starts with a quick introduction to data warehousing (without resorting to giving an entire history of the subject, as seems so common today) and how it relates to OLAP and then moves right into the Analysis Servies tools.
The chapters are well written and get you the information you need, without missing any major details. Even if you don't plan to take the "step by step" approach, this book is worth having by your side.
All right... now for the downsides. At best this book is good for beginners. These are some of the areas where I found it came up short:
- Sizing systems that will support Analysis Services. The book talks a bit about how big cubes are, but there is no information about cube performance/cube sizing, etc. Basically, this book won't help you develop a hardware plan for hosting Analysis Services.
- Accessing Analysis Services via the web. All of Microsoft's literature talks about how SQL Server 2000's great support for the web/XML. Strangely, it is very hard to find this information for Analysis Services, and this book doesn't provide any guidance. Right now it seems that the best you can do to find this information is hunt around Microsoft's site.
Overall I still think this is good book. However, if you are going to be building a large Analysis Services system, expect to be looking for other sources to answer all of your questions.
