In the last months I talked mostly about PowerPivot, but Analysis Services is still growing and a very good sign of that is the number of downloads of The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper, who has been published almost 5 years ago and recently surpassed 20,000 downloads. The download trend is a constant line made of tens of downloads every single working day. Considering the technical level of this paper, I think this is a terrific result. Also the sales of our Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services are constant and there is no visible decrease after 2 years. My conclusion is that Analysis Services usage is constantly increasing and its wide adoption is also confirmed by several feedback I receive from several sources.
That being stated, it still makes sense to improve the knowledge about Analysis Services, regardless of the new features that Denali will bring to the table. All the skills in Analysis Services 2008 will still be valid in Denali when it will work in “molap” mode. The most advanced course you can attend today is the SSAS Maestro. The next edition is planned in Redmond, WA (June 13-17) and Madrid, Spain (July 18-22).
I will be one of the trainers of the Madrid edition – you can find more information about both editions, trainers and links for registration in this blog post from Denny Lee.
Looking at this fall, the PASS Summit 2011 will run in Seattle, WA on October 11-14, 2011. This year the sessions will be selected according to the community preference. You can vote the session you would like to see in the final agenda. This link points to the sessions I submitted. I proposed a DAX Deep Dive pre-conference and three “regular” sessions: What’s New in DAX 2.0, Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach and Analysis Services Advanced Best Practices. A lot of DAX, but OLAP is still here. It will be interesting to see what sessions will be more voted – I look forward to see the vote result (and don’t forget to vote!).