It is finally available the SSAS 2008 book I wrote with Chris Webb and Alberto Ferrari: Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services. The book is also available on Amazon. You can also read a sample chapter for free.

We worked several months on this book, but I’d say it is the result of years of experience on the field that we’ve compared and distilled into a single not-too-long book. We take for grant that the reader is already comfortable with the concepts of dimensions and measures of a cube and we spent all our efforts in condensing best practices, advices and warning about not-good-habits and not-so-good-features in eleven chapters (like you can see in the Table of Contents), ranging all the lifecycle of a cube from the data warehouse design to the deployment and performance optimization.

You could expect that this could be an under the cover book for ubergeek readers, but it is not. We wanted to create a practical guide to transfer experience and give guidance on real-world projects, problems and solutions. We considered both the large cube scenarios and the equally important and widespread small-medium cube case.

I hope that the final result is what we dreamed at the beginning: a book we would have had on the shelf the first day we started to work on a real project with Analysis Services. Time and readers will say if we reached this goal also for other SSAS developers.