Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Getting Started with SSAS 2005

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to take on a BI Developer position. In this position I have done quite a bit of development with SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS 2005).

Before taking on this position I had 8 years programming experience with a variety of languages, mostly OO. In all those cases, the systems used SQL Server as the backend. Thus, I gained 8 years solid SQL Server T-SQL development experience, plus some database administration experience. I've worked with SQL Server 6.5, 7.0, 2000, and 2005 from the RDBMS side.

This year, while networking with other BI folks, I discovered one of the biggest difficulties in taking on a BI Developer position can be lack of other resources available at your company for assistance. While companies with internal software developers usually have several of them, the amount of BI developers at a company can easily be 1 or 2. Thus, a need for networking and awareness of on-line resources became apparent.

The initial purpose of this blog is going to be assisting people, generally programmers or database architects in attaining knowledge needed to develop SSAS 2005 cubes. If you are already an intermediate or advanced SSAS 2005 developer, there are many intermediate/advanced blogs on my BI blogroll that have a greater chance of meeting your needs. If you are looking to break into the SSAS 2005 space, I hope to assist you in your learning experiences here.


As I blog, I plan to post resources that took me several months to find. Hopefully, they can save you quite a bit of ramp up time. As this blog is just now starting, please let me know ideas on how you would like to see it develop.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Welcome to the `sphere. Looking forward to learning more about BI!

Anonymous said...

Hi Kristin,
Like most of the beginner i am keen at start to get in to BI. I work on a BI Tool for pulling reports. Once data is pulled i get the graphs generated to manager's need. Sounds like Information worker right? but i am B.Tech in IT. I want to get in to BI level of reporting. As i work in MS as a vendor i would like to move on to SQL BI. Please help me to get started. I cleared 70-431 but only using dumps so not very strong. Have to write 445 and 446 but still that will not get me what i need to get a job in SQL BI. help please - Malli

K. Ferrier said...

Feel free to post some questions and I'll be happy to answer them.

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