Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

Sivakumar Harinath

Stephen R. Quinn

Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
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2006 Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

0-7645-7918-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-7645-7918-9

ISBN-10: 0-7645-7918-5

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About the Authors

Sivakumar Harinath

Sivakumar Harinath was born in Chennai, India. Siva has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His thesis title was: "Data Management Support for Distributed Data Mining of Large Datasets over High Speed Wide Area Networks." Siva has worked for Newgen Software Technologies (P) Ltd., IBM Toronto Labs, Canada, and has been at Microsoft since February of 2002. Siva started as a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) in the Analysis Services Performance Team and is currently an SDET Lead for Analysis Services 2005. Siva's other interests include high performance computing, distributed systems and high speed networking. Siva is married to Shreepriya and had twins Praveen and Divya during the course of writing this book. His personal interests include travel, games/sports (in particular, Chess, Carrom, Racquet Ball, Board games) and Cooking. You can reach Siva at [e-mail]

Stephen Quinn

Stephen Quinn was born in San Luis Obispo, California. Stephen has a Masters degree (1988) in Cognitive Psychology from California State University, Chico and is scheduled to receive his Masters of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Washington, Seattle, in June 2006. Stephen is married to Katherine and is raising his daughter, Anastasia. He has been in most roles common to the R&D environment i.e., software developer, technical writer, technical support specialist and several quality assurance roles. Stephen has published some 20 articles in the magazines Byte, InfoWorld and Datamation. With 15+ years of software experience; Stephen has worked the last 8 years at Microsoft; most recently as a Technical Writer in SQL User Education and before that, for several years as Test Manager in the SQL Business Intelligence Unit. You can reach Stephen at [e-mail]

Credits

Executive Editor
Robert Elliot

Development Editor
Adaobi Obi Tulton

Technical Editor
Leah Etienne
Dylan Huang
Tom Mathews

Production Editor
Pamela Hanley

Copy Editor
Kim Coffer

Editorial Manager
Mary Beth Wakefield

Production Manager
Tim Tate

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher
Richard Swadley

Vice President and Executive Publisher
Joseph B. Wikert

Project Coordinator
Michael Kruzil

Graphics and Production Specialists
Beth Brooks
Andrea Dahl
Lauren Goddard
Denny Hager
Stephanie D. Jumper
Lysney Osborn
Jill Proll
Alicia B. South
Amanda Spagnuolo

Quality Control Technician
John Greenough

Media Development Project Supervisor
Laura Atkinson

Proofreading
Shannon Ramsey

Indexing
Techbooks

I dedicate this book in the grandest possible manner to my dear wife Shreepriya who has been fully supportive and put up with me disappearing from home and the late nights when I worked on this book. It is also dedicated to my two month old twins Praveen and Divya who do not know what a book is yet. I wish their cute photographs could be on the cover page. I dedicate this book in memory of my father Harinath Govindarajalu who passed away in 1999 who I am sure would have been proud of this great achievement and to my mother Sundara Bai. Finally, dedicate the book to my inlaws Sundaravathanem Sanjeevi and Geethalakshmi Sanjeevi who have been very supportive and helping during the last six months.

Sivakumar Harinath

I dedicate my contribution to this book to the woman who was most supportive and encouraging about the project. That would be my wife, Kyung Eun (Katherine) Quinn. Also, I would like to dedicate this to my kid, Anastasia who would have preferred I spent much of that writing time with her. To my mother, Roselma Quinn who tolerated incessant last minute changes of plan due to book-related work. And my father, Stephen Thomas Quinn, who tolerated my whining about how much work this book was to produce. Finally, to my MBA study team, thanks to everyone on the team; Jim Braun, Liz Younger, Michael Styles, Kevin Heath, Eduardo Alvarez-Godinez, and Dave Lovely for being understanding about what I was going through.

Stephen R. Quinn

In memory of all those who have been devastated due to the natural calamities in the last two years such as the South Asian Tsunami, Storms Katrina and Rita in the United States and earthquakes in India and Pakistan.

Acknowledgments

Wow!!! It has been an amazing two-year journey, almost to the day, from when we decided to partner in writing this book. It all started when Siva jokingly mentioned to his wife the idea of writing a book on SQL Server Analysis Services 2005. She took it seriously and motivated him to start working on the idea in October of 2003. As always, there are so many people who deserve mentioning that we're afraid we'll miss someone. If you are among those missed, please accept our humblest apologies. We first need to thank Amir Netz, our then Product Unit Manager, who not only granted us the permission to moonlight while working at Microsoft, but also provided constant encouragement and support. It is apropos that it is called moonlighting because we saw a lot of moonlight while working on this book - multiple all nighters took place. We thank Zhaohui Tang, who helped us get in touch with the right publishing people. Our sincerest thanks go to Wiley Publishing for giving us this opportunity and placing their trust in first-time authors like us. They provided immense help, constant feedback, and expert support. We would especially like to thank our editors, Bob Elliot and Adaobi Obi Tulton, who didn't so much as support us as prod us along — which is exactly what we needed at the time.

We would like to thank our technical reviewers, Leah Etienne and Dylan Huang, who graciously offered us their assistance. Dylan also contributed to the technical content in chapters 9, 11 and 13. We thank all our colleagues in the Analysis Services product team (including Developers, Program Managers, and Testers) who helped us in accomplishing the immense feat of writing a book on a developing product. From the Analysis Services team, special thanks go to Akshai Mirchandani, Richard Tkachuk, Mosha Pasumansky, Marius Dumitru, T.K. Anand, Sasha Berger, Paul Sanders, Thierry D'Hers, Matt Carroll, Andrew Garbuzov, Zhaohui Tang, Artur Pop, and Rob Zare for patiently answering our questions. We also thank our Analysis Services documentation colleagues Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mathews for their helpful input.

Most importantly, we owe our deepest thanks to our wonderful families. Without their support and sacrifice, this book would have become one of those many projects that one begins and never finishes. Our families were the ones who truly took the brunt of it and sacrificed shared leisure time, all in support of our literary pursuit. We especially want to thank them for their patience with us, and the grace it took not killing us during some of the longer work binges. During this long journey life did not stand still: Siva's wife gave birth to twins, Praveen and Divya, and Stephen finished the first year (plus part of the second) of MBA studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Finally to Siva's wife, Shreepriya, and to Stephen's wife, Katherine, none of this would have been possible without your support.