Fast Track to MDX

IloveBusinessIntelligence.IloveBIbecauseitisallaboutbecomingbetter. BI is all about empowering us with knowledge and that knowledge is the power to realize our full potential. As Zorge the spy said, 'knowledge is power', and who doesn't love to have the power to know, to understand and to make intelligent decision? I do. Since the dawn of the modern information system it was obvious that the information accumulated in the machine is wasted if there is no way to analyze it and learn from it. From as early as the 1950s, data analysis systems and, later, decision support systems were designed, developed anddeployedwiththatintent.However,onlyinthelastdecadehavethese systems become both reasonably affordable and mainstream and their business impact indisputable. The last decade has also seen the emergence of OLAP as the centerpiece of the BI technologies. The OLAP multidimensional databases combine incredible performance with unsurpassed analytical power and, in my opinion, are the foundation of the BI platform. While the performance differences between the multidimensional da- bases and the traditional relational databases are very significant, Moore's law, which states that the hardware computing power doubles every 18 months, renders this advantage of the OLAP databases temporary. Sooner or later, the raw computing power of the common server machines will be sufficient to provide the performance needed for sophisticated analysis even when the data is stored in a relational database.