Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

1.8. Summary

Reading this chapter may have felt like the linguistic equivalent of drinking from a fire hose; it is good you hung in there because now you have a foundation from which to build as you work through the rest of the book. Now you know data warehousing is all about structuring data for decision support. The data is consumed by the business analyst and business decision-maker and can be analyzed through OLAP and Data Mining techniques.

OLAP is a multidimensional database format that is a world apart in form and function when compared to an OLTP relational database system. You saw how OLAP uses a structure called a cube, which in turn relies on fact tables (which are populated with data called facts) and dimension tables. These dimension tables can be configured around one or more fact tables to create a star schema. If a dimension table is deconstructed to point to a chain of sub-dimension tables, the schema is called a snowflake schema.

By choosing SQL Server 2008 you have chosen a business intelligence platform with great features with reliability, availability, and scalability. The SQL Server business intelligence platform is the fastest growing with highest market share product in the market. The rest of this book illustrates the power of SQL Server Analysis Services 2008, which is the core part of the BI platform from Microsoft.

In the unlikely event that you didn't read the Introduction, mention was made that you should read at least the first three chapters serially ...