This is given by Ben Aminnia.
He’s really putting an emphasis on planning, which is great. Lynn Langit said her new book has the first 5 chapters devoted to what needs to be done before you even open BIDS.
Ben has an interesting presentation style, at least for this talk. He’s giving it like his company has an existing Analysis Services project that we are interviewing to possibly take over. I’m not quite sure yet we are on the driving end (we are really interviewing Ben to see if we want to take the job) or on the other end (he is interviewing us to see if we’re qualified to take the job). I hope more of the former since I’m at the talk because I don’t know anything about SSAS.
While he is doing and interview style here at Code Camp he is assuming we don’t know about SSAS so that’s a good strategy to take. He just gave a really good 4 minute background on Analysis in general and what a Cube is (since I raised my hand because I didn’t know! :))
During this talk Ben is using the example of a system that monitors disk space availability (among other data). He actually has a great real world system for doing just this. It is based on the cover story of the February 2008 issue of SQL Server Magazine. You can find the online version here. It’s a very complex SSIS package but it allowed Ben to do this without having to spend months developing it. For him it works great and is easy to maintain. Ben has even made his own additions and discussed these changes with the original author. If you contact Ben directly (ben at sql.la) he can give you his additions.
Great talk!