Professional Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Buyers - be aware, you need this book. Analysis Services is a huge product and it's impossible to cover all aspects of it. But this is a 1000 pages well worth your time and money. If there was one thing that could be improved about this book it would be adding even more, complete examples. On a few occasions the book says "we'll let you (the reader) explore this functionality". With all examples the book could easily have been over 1500 pages long.

I am a microsoft professional consultant who makes a living working with Microsoft BI toolsets. I find this book of tremendous value because of the contents and because of who wrote it. The authors are part of the SSAS product group as well as http://www.sqlcat.com team (the #1 BI application team that takes on the world's largest and greatest database and Business Intelligent design challenges and delivers great designs and success stories)...this is the best of the best at Microsoft. I read the book end-to-end. I can tell you that the MDX, performance tuning, and scenario chapters alone, are worth the price of the book many times over. This book helped me succeed in my job and go further than other consultants. I would highly recommend this book to "professional" consultants. Beginners who want to learn the fundamentals to MSFT BI would benefit greatly from this best-practices microsoft team.