IloveBusinessIntelligence.IloveBIbecauseitisallaboutbecomingbetter. BI is all about empowering us with knowledge and that knowledge is the power to realize our full potential. As Zorge the spy said, “knowledge is power”, and who doesn’t love to have the power to know, to understand and to make intelligent decision? I do. Since the dawn of the modern information system it was obvious that the information accumulated in the machine is wasted if there is no way to analyze it and learn from it. From as early as the 1950s, data analysis systems and, later, decision support systems were designed, developed anddeployedwiththatintent.However,onlyinthelastdecadehavethese systems become both reasonably affordable and mainstream and their business impact indisputable. The last decade has also seen the emergence of OLAP as the centerpiece of the BI technologies. The OLAP multidimensional databases combine incredible performance with unsurpassed analytical power and, in my opinion, are the foundation of the BI platform. While the performance differences between the multidimensional da- bases and the traditional relational databases are very significant, Moore’s law, which states that the hardware computing power doubles every 18 months, renders this advantage of the OLAP databases temporary. Sooner or later, the raw computing power of the common server machines will be sufficient to provide the performance needed for sophisticated analysis even when the data is stored in a relational database.
OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) is the most powerful Business Intelligence tool currently available and Microsoft's Analysis Manager makes OLAP cubes incredibly easy to build and deploy. However the real power of OLAP lies in its ability to help you solve real-life business problems; to release that power you need to use the language that controls the cubes and allows them to be queried. That language is MDX (Multi Dimensional eXpressions).
Fast Track to MDX gives you all the necessary background to let you to write useful, powerful MDX expressions and introduces the most frequently used MDX functions and constructs. No prior knowledge is assumed and examples are used throughout the book to rapidly develop your MDX skills to the point where you can solve real business problems.
Mark Whitehorn, co-author of the best-selling Inside Relational Databases, is renowned for his knowledge of database systems and the lucidity of his writing. Robert Zare is a Program Manager for Analysis Services at Microsoft: his inspiring talks on MDX sowed the seeds from which this book grew. Mosha Pasumansky was one of the authors of the OLEDB for OLAP specification that defined the MDX language and later he was the developer in charge of the first implementation of MDX in the Microsoft OLAP Services 7.0 product. He is currently the development lead of the Analysis Services engine team.
Second Edition – It was the clarity, precision and sheer readability of the first edition that made it a best-seller. With that firmly in mind the authors have left the original 18 chapters intact (apart from minor updates); meaning that the second edition remains the best introduction to MDX that is available. What they have done is to add three brand new chapters. These introduce the topic of recursion in MDX, walk the reader through the process of creating recursive expressions and finally demonstrate how recursion can be used to effectively solve a series of businessproblems.
Forward by Amir Netz, Product Unit Manager, SQL Server – Analysis Services at Microsoft.
