Foreword

For most people who have already worked with Analysis Services, the names Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari probably need little introduction. They have worked on some of the most challenging Analysis Services projects, written multiple books about the product, and put together fascinating blog posts on best practices and other technical topics. Besides all of the above, they are frequent presenters at conferences and hold popular training courses on a wide range of topics related to business intelligence and Analysis Services. I’ve met with Alberto and Marco many times over the years and they have a wonderful passion for the BI space and a pure love of learning and teaching.

As a long-term member of the Analysis Services engineering team, I’ve worked on a large spectrum of the SSAS engine as well as parts of Power BI. I’ve truly loved building Analysis Services. The strong and enthusiastic engineering team combined with our amazing partners and customers make it so worthwhile!

Having designed and built features in Analysis Services over so many releases, I sometimes think I know exactly what customers need and want from the product. But my conversations with Marco and Alberto usually remind me how much more they know about BI in the real world. Our discussions are always fascinating and thought-provoking because both of them have a tendency to provide unexpected viewpoints that shatter my preconceived notions. The questions are wild and wide-ranging, the debates often rage on in emails, and the consequences are always positive for the product and our customers.

Every product team is occasionally accused of “living in ivory towers” and ignoring what is important to customers. Having our MVPs and experts act as our sounding board, throw cold water on our bad ideas, and show support for our good ideas is more valuable than even they realize. But I believe that the biggest value they bring to our Analysis Services world is acting as our proxies and translating our documentation and other communications (which can sometimes be too technical or abstract for non-developers), and creating examples and solutions that show people how things should really be done. This book is an excellent example of our expert community leading the way.

As always, Marco and Alberto have put in a massive amount of effort to research the new Analysis Services 2016 release. You can benefit from their expertise and hard work and take advantage of all the lessons that they have learned since they started using the new product.

I’m personally very proud of the Analysis Services 2016 release, which includes the release of so many new features and performance improvements that I can name only a few of my favorites: Tabular metadata, the TOM object model, SuperDAX, Parallel Partition Processing, BiDirectional CrossFiltering, etc. After reviewing many of the chapters of this new book, I’m confident that it will be a truly useful and educational companion to the product, and readers will quickly be able to start taking advantage of the potential of this new version of Analysis Services.

I look forward to more collaboration with Marco and Alberto and wish them all success with this new book!

Akshai Mirchandani
Principal Software Engineer
Microsoft Corporation