Business Intelligence is so much more than the technologies involved. Doing BI well is about delivering the right solution for the client, and being able to plan accordingly, about finding a match between the technologies and the business needs, and about being able to come up with a good design that incorporates not only the data warehouse, but also the OLAP database and client interfaces.
When I first picked up Smart Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2008, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t know whether it would be design heavy, or technology heavy. I suspected it would be the latter, but without going deeply enough into the technologies.
But I was pleasantly surprised. It seems to be heavyweight enough in both design and technology. There are useful sections on every technical aspect of Business Intelligence, including Data Mining, Beginner and Advanced MDX, and more. And yet there are useful sections about BI principles — the kind of things that you come across in books by Kimball.
I feel like there are an increasing number of really good books about SQL Server, and this is definitely one.
