Analysis Services 2005 was a significant leap from Analysis Services 2000 in building your multidimensional databases right from the concept of building your cubes in Business Intelligence Development Studio to the concept of the Unified Dimensional Model with attribute and user hierarchies. The first edition of this book, Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX , was aimed at novice to advanced users and was very well received by the readers. Analysis Services 2005 is a large and complex product that needed a lot of fine - tuning to get the best performance.

Analysis Services 2008 added enhancements to the Analysis Services 2005 tools that make it easy to use and build your databases right for efficient performance to significant enhancements on the server to provide improved performance. Hence, we decided to write this book to provide insight into the enhancements in Analysis Services 2008 and help you understand how to utilize them effectively for your business needs. If you have read the first edition of the book, you will find several chapters ’ titles to be the same. Because Analysis Services 2008 is an incremental release, we have made enhancements to each chapter appropriately. We have enhanced the performance chapters and added a few additional scenarios that we believe will help you to understand and build multidimensional databases efficiently. This book still is targeted at novice to advanced users. If you are not familiar with SQL Server Analysis Services 2005, we highly recommend you go through the chapters in sequence to understand and use Analysis Services 2008 effectively to build, process, and deploy top - of - the - line business intelligence applications.