Summary

We’ve covered quite a bit of the functionality available for building OLAP cubes in BIDS, and we did this in two (albeit long) chapters! Did you notice that we talked about concepts for six chapters and implementation for only two chapters? The fact that BIDS is easy to use if you fully understand OLAP concepts before you start developing your BI solutions is a key point to remember from reading this book. We’ve repeatedly seen projects in trouble because of the (natural) tendency to just open BIDS and get on with it. If we’ve done our job, we’ve given you enough information to develop a very useful OLAP cube by now.

We still have more to cover, though. In the next chapter, we’ll dive into the world of cube processing. After that, we’ll look at MDX in detail. Still later, we’ll get to data mining. You have covered a good bit of ground already, and the basics of OLAP are under your belt at this point!