Book Review: MDX Solutions: With Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion Essbase by George Spofford et. al.

Reference Book with Little Competition

MDX Solutions is an essential reference book for anyone using Analysis Services 2005. No other book covers the subject as thoroughly as this one. However, it remains only a reference book. It is thick, extremely dense, and not a tutorial that you can read cover to cover. Believe me; I've tried, more than once in fact.

It's five authors are experts on MDX and know their stuff, but unfortunately there is no correlation between their raw knowledge and the ability to teach the subject in a step-wise, easy-to-follow manner for someone new to MDX. The text is dense and the examples often difficult to follow. That said, you will need this book if you are planning to do very much MDX programming simply because as of this writing there not better alternatives out there. I wish there were.

A lot of time has obviously been put into this book and I applaud the authors for sharing as much as they have; however, it's very unfortunate that the authors didn't have it edited by multiple reviewers new to MDX who could have turned the book into a better tutorial.

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