Preface

Data has always been a key success of any business.  Thanks to advances in software, processing and storage technology data is now more abundant than ever.  Businesses can collect and store data from internal systems and mash up external data to new insights about their business.  One of the challenges is wrangling the data into a manner that is useful to your organization.  Microsoft’s SQL Server Analysis Services running in tabular mode allows you to quickly model your data to build business intelligence solutions that will enable your organization to make better decisions.

This book is designed to walk you through the necessary steps to learn the fundamentals of tabular modeling.  It uses a public dataset that recorded all crashed in the State of Iowa.  Using this dataset, you will design, build, and modify a tabular model.  If you are an experienced developer this book can be a great reference to fill gaps in areas, you may not have used.  Each recipe can stand alone and show you how to implement a specific feature.  If you are a new business intelligence developer and have never used Analysis Services.  Start from the beginning of the book and walk through the recipes.  Each chapter is designed to build on the knowledge learned in the prior chapters.  If you follow all of the recipes in the book you will build a complete solution to help further your understanding from collecting data, modeling, enhancing and visualizing information.  You should then be comfortable transferring your knowledge from the examples and recipes in this book and apply the concepts to your own business data and challenges.