Download the sample database. Sit down and fire up BIDS. Read and follow the directions. You'll be a better person for it.

Well, you'll know more about the Microsoft BI stack anyway. It's a great way to get in and see every major (and most minor) feature of the stack.

I've already got experience with tools such as Cognos, ProClarity, Informatica and others. I bought this book to figure out how to use Microsoft's BI tools.

The book really is a case study book where you are the business analyst, the data modeler, the systems analyst the ETL guy and the report developer. It is written with a "learn by doing" premise. If you haven't done all of the business requirements exercises, data modeler tasks, etc... you won't be able to do the Integration Services exercises or the MDX exercises in the book. In other words, you must 1) read the book in the order of its chapters and 2) do the exercises in the chapter order.

Additionally, many chapters are a review of the theory (like snowflake vs. star), business requirements gathering and why you have data marts stuff like that. If you already know how to do these things, or you know that you don't have to take on that role, then you probably won't find this book as useful.

I have chosen this book as a textbook for my graduate class in Business School, after sampling over a dozen BI textbooks in the market. This book is a good blend of BI concepts, managerial applications, as well as hands-on skills. Most of the other textbooks are either too dry or too technical. This book gives you an overview of BI components, processes, and applications in business world. The step-by-step learn-by-doing exercises are particularly helpful for students who might otherwise be intimidated by the technology. Supplimenting this book with another more conceptual/managerial type of BI book will be perfect for Business school students.

This book is an introduction to the Business Intelligence suite of programs that come with SQL Server 2005: Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. The book takes a learn-by-doing approach where the author provides step-by-step instructions for creating and populating data marts as well as extracting information from them. Since this is a broad topic, the coverage is shallow but it does provide an adequate introduction to these products. However, there are numerous issues with this book which you should be aware of before buying it.

The first five chapters set the stage by explaining what business intelligence is and why it is important to an organization. It should have been condensed to about ten pages rather than sixty. The chapter on Integration Services had a nice learn-by-doing exercise but the bulk of the chapter simply lists the various tasks available. The same info (organized the same way) is easily available from Books Online with a lot more detail.

The author walks you through creating an Analysis Services cube from the bottom up (with an existing database) and the top down (using the cube wizard to auto-generate the underlying schema). However, the author does this in the following order:

1) Create database schema for the manufacturing database.
2) Use wizard to create cube and schema for the sales database.
3) Use SSIS to populate most of the manufacturing dimesion tables.
4) Add a second fact table to the manufacturing database.
5) Populate the manufacturing fact tables and the remaining dimension table.
6) Create cube for manufacturing database.
7) Finish the cube by adding additional/calculated measures.

Of course, these exercises are sprinkled throughout 200 pages of text with no easy way to reference them. You may have noticed that the Sales DM is never populated. Even though you are walked through the other processes step-by-step, he mentions in a single paragraph at the end of chapter eight that you need to download some projects from the book's website to populate the Sales datamart. However, no link is provided and there are some oddities in the files provided. For example, the SalesDM backup produces an eight gig log file, presumably because they had the database in full recovery mode when populating it. Fortunately he provides the SSIS project so you can get around that issue.

Also, there are a number of errors, particularly in the code, that are not listed in the errata. For example, '<' on page 434 should be '>' in both cases while '[Day]' on page 445 should be '[Month]'. The code doesn't break, but the results are not what the text describes. Finally, there is no apparant way to submit new errata on the book's website.

Despite these shortcomings, this is a good book if you are a complete newcomer to Microsoft BI and need an overview of all three products but are not after in depth information on any of them.

The book provides a thoughtful informative view of how to use the Business Intelligence features of Visual Studio and SQL Server. Each chapter appropriately builds on the previous information.

The reader is presented with an introduction to Business Intelligence. Next, the construction of a cube using Analysis Services is explained and later the use of Integration Services is illustrated. Lastly, working the data with MDX queries is discussed and then the final data is displayed with Reporting Services.

I recommend the book to beginners and intermediate developers.

I bought this because all the reviews were good but I've been very disappointed. The book provides an excellent overview that clearly details what BI features SQL Server 2005 has but it does little to actually explain HOW you do things. Yes, I know there are the do by learning sessions but they are pretty basic. I've been trying to implement some standard ETL scenarios with Integration Services and the book has been nearly useless. I can't even get it to explain fundamental concepts such as the distinguishing characteristics between a Data Source and a Connection. Not helpful!

This is overall a very good read for those who like the hands on approach to learning. The author certainly knows the topic.

Being new to this topic, I found it very easy to get lost in the details of the step by step examples, quite often forgetting the objective of the exercise which are often several pages long!

There are also errors in some of the examples which are not so obvious to
fix without the help of google. ( Tip for Vista users, dont use the Fox Pro drivers in the download get the latest from Microsoft) This is especially frustrating for newcomers when the error does not often surface until you are executing later examples (the examples in this book, base on each other)

Please dont let my comments put you off buying this excellent book. For beginners, expect to have to read the book more than once.

This is a great book for those of us starting to learn the feature rich Microsoft BI tools.

Its greatest strength is to fit the tools and features into the BI life cycle. I tried several other books and approaches but couldn't get the big picture with enough technical details to actually start building a BI solution.

This book is the perfect place to start using this feature rich BI tool set. Without knowing how all the tools fit together it was difficult to make any real progress with more feature specific material.

I highly recommend this book to everyone looking to learn BI technology from Microsoft. The examples were clear. This is a book for those of us who learn by doing.

I also used Brian's book on Reporting Services 2000 a few years ago. It allowed me to go from no experience to writing reports in a few days

Many thanks to Brian for the great book.

This book is a perfect place to jump in and get your feet wet. I can't say how many tech books have put me to sleep before I've absorbed the content, this is not one of them. It's well laid out and will give you the understanding and ability to create your own dashboards. I agree with the reviews that this book will not make you an expert in Integration Services, Analysis Services, Business Intelligence Studio, or Excel Services. It does save you the money, time and headaches from buying each specific book and trying to incorporate all of these products on your own.

Good Luck!

Is the next step when you start working with MI tools

This is a good starting book on the subject , it could certainly have been better if author did not postpone delivering to the end but he could shows in excel pivot table example with each step along the way so reader can see directly results of certain actions , but anyway it's a good book and prepare yourself for at least another one in the subject after reading this one

This book is not going to make anyone a SQL Server 2005 expert. But for me it was perfect. I have been designing BI solutions for years, using Oracle or DB2 with Cognos or Hyperion. I have started using Microsoft now, and going through book helped a lot. I don't feel that I'm a MS expert after reading this, but I do feel comfortable with the SQL Server 2005 services.
Think of it this way, it's a good beginner's book for SQL Server Database, Analysis services, Reporting Services, and Integration services - all in one book.

This book is not going to make anyone a SQL Server 2005 expert. But for me it was perfect. I have been designing BI solutions for years, using Oracle or DB2 with Cognos or Hyperion. I have started using Microsoft now, and going through book helped a lot. I don't feel that I'm a MS expert after reading this, but I do feel comfortable with the SQL Server 2005 services.
Think of it this way, it's a good beginner's book for SQL Server Database, Analysis services, Reporting Services, and Integration services - all in one book.

This book contains the basics to understand Analysis Services and even intermediate material fo rthe enthusiasts of the topic.

If you learn better through the combination of conceptual overview and detailed walk throughs you'll love Brian Larson's approach.
I too thought I had a problem (as noted by reviewer B Hynum) with the sample data, but the author was quick with a response. My advice is, follow the instructions carefully and don't try to be clever by skipping steps!

I would agree with the other statements about this book covering many aspects of BI. Unlike other books that focus primarily on Analysis Services, this book covers everything from data source integration to custom reporting. I was even a bit surprised to see a section on artificial intelligence as it applies to data mining. Just as the others mentiond, if it covered every aspect of each of the pieces of BI, the book would be too big. I would have liked to see more focus on the key elements to BI rather than briefly touching them as it does everything else.

OK -- it's not terrible, but it reminds me of many books that start with "this is a field, this is a record, this is a table." It started fine - I learned the difference between star and snowflake schema, the benefits of a data mart, and the key feature of SQL 2005 Analysis Services that addresses the latency between OLTP and OLAP (it's a feature called Universal Data Model (UDM). All cool. The trouble begins in the subsequent chapters with the cutesy MaximumMinimum company and the painstaking, step-by-step "now you do it" approach. Which means you can only make use of the info if you're sitting in front of a computer. Not my cuppa.

I have enjoyed reading this book but the teaching approach was off for me. As a consultant, i need to move quickly through materials. That means i need to be able to load supporting materials quickly from download. Neither the means of getting at the download nor the actual download was QA'd. Instructions for download are scattered throughout the book or missing. Also important installation instruction was overlooked. This is odd because every *manual* step for building each db/dim/measure is presented in detail (note, i did NOT QA all the steps:-). Example: pg 116-126 >> 10 pages of instruction to build the DM. Most readers of this book do not need to know how to build a db. I went to the download & used it to build the DM -- i figured it would be there and it was BUT i did not find a pointer in the book for the DM download. That's the tip of the iceberg, it gets worse from there. It is not likely that someone besides the author has tried to use the download. The server name is blarsonxp2\bmlsql2005 -- remember that as u try to use the download. Don't get me wrong, Larson KNOWS his stuff, no question. I'm getting plenty from the book. There are just thoughtless omissions and oversights in the download -- another example, the MaxMinSalesDM_Log is over 8G, pretty big for a sample. JMHO

With this book, Mr. Larson executes a task not easy to do-he covers a lot of ground in a few steps. He covers all major topics of BI related to SQL Server 2005 and has sample exercises (Learn By Doing) that reinforce the knowledge. What is great about the exercises is that he uses a fictional company in one real scenario, unlike many authors.

As someone not very familiar with Data Mining/Warehousing, I found his explanations to be at my level of understanding. He also ties each aspect he discusses in with the other subjects as you go along, making the whole concept of Business Intelligence clear.

I look forward to reading more of Mr. Larson's publications.

... is a good, hands-on book that will introduce the numerous changes to how BI is implemented with the new Microsoft Products: SQL Server 2005, and VS.Net 2005. This book provides somewhat more of an overview, but one would need to do further reading on each of the topic areas to become both conversant and professionally competent. No single 750 page book could bring you to the depths of: Analysis Services, Integration Services, Reporting Services, Data Mart Development, Data Mining, Deployment of BI using Excel etc... This text will orient you to what is available and how the modules link together, but further study will be required.

The Data Mining section was the most abbreviated for what is perhaps the most complex of the covered topics.

If you have existing expertise w/ SQL Server 2000 (Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Data Transformation Services) and VS.Net 2003 generally, you will find this text to be quite useful as a guide to what has changed with BI; and the changes are procedurally significant. Visual Studio 2005 is now the primary interface to accessing and implementing BI. This text walks you through some concrete examples and you will be able to update your existing procedural knowledge to the new development model.

To avoid problems, install a copy of SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (if you don't have Enterprise edition at your disposal). I used SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition and had to make several accommodating changes on the fly - to address fundamental feature differences. VS.Net 2005 Pro comes with the Developer Edition of SQL 2005, but you can purchase it separately from Amazon for ~$45.

This text has a few inconsequential editing errors that you should be able to identify fairly easily. If you want an excellent text on Reporting Services, alone, purchase Brian Larson's "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services" text from Osborne.

This is the second book written by Brian Larson that I've purchased. Just like his book on SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, this one also delivers everything as advertised. It provides a complete overview on the business intelligence components of SQL Server 2005. By following the detailed examples provided in the book, a reader can learn how to develop their own BI applications. I would recommend this book to everyone looking to learn this new technology from Microsoft.