Analysis Services Roadmap

A good presentation by Siva Kumar Harinath (Senior Test lead from Microsoft) Analysis Services builds confidence that SSAS 2008 Scales better than SSAS 2005.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/9/0/4906f81b-eb1a-49c3-bb05-ff3bcbb5d5ae/SQL%20SERVER%202008%20-%20BUSINESS%20INTELLIGENCE%20AND%20ADMIN/Analysis%20Services%20redefined%20with%20SQL%20Server%202008%20-%20Sivakumar%Harinath.pdf

I am excited to see the below slide, which provides high level Road map of SSAS.






In the above image they mentioned that the mission of SQL 2005 has been completed in SSAS 2008. This seems to be true with the below information.

Microsoft Adcenter orignally built their Business Intelligence solution for their online advertising compaings on Microsoft Bing. They shifted their current application from SSAS 2005 to SSAS 2008 and noticed significant performance improvements without any changes and they got more opportunity to tune it further. Following URL contains the complete information on the same.

http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2009/09/19/accelerating-microsoft-adcenter-with-microsoft-sql-server-2008-analysis-services.aspx



Below Image clearly confirms that shifting their current app from SSAS 2005 to SSAS 2008 cut down their half oftheir processing time.

Parent-Child dimension hierarchy in SSRS 2008

When I first worked on SQL Server Reporting Server 2000 about 4 years ago. I did not like 2 items.
1) Ability to develop a report on Parent-Child dimension (Ragged hierarchy)

2) Ability to type the MDX and see the output in RS report immediately (Without need to get the field list).

Though my 2nd item is still not possible, but SSRS 2008 allowed flexibility to achieve #1.

Usage of Parent child dimension for Chart of Account or Employee or Company dimension is a very common case. But unfortunately there was no direct method to get the Parent-child dimension hierarchy displayed in single column in SSRS 2000. It is hard to build balanced hierarchy all the time and group them to have drill down from column1 (level 1) to columns 2 (level 2) I am excited to see this feature SSRS 2008 ( I guess 2005 as well) .

Here is the OUTPUT