Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 3/E [Paperback]

Get ready to learn, but be ready to work for it. This book is packed full of hands on exercises the author calls "Learn by Doing". Every topic covered is accompanied by a "Learn by Doing" section. If you take the time to go through these while reading the book you will absorb triple the information. It takes a lot of time, but is definitely worth it.

The author does provide a download of all the databases and projects created throughout the book, so if you do not have time to manually type everything in, you can download and configure them. I did the exercises of the things I had not done before, but used the downloads to explore solutions of concepts I already had a pretty good understanding of.

Although this book is packed full of hands on exercises, it is also packed full of accompanying information. The first part of the book provides a great overview and foundation of Business Intelligence.

The second part of the book is where the hands on exercises begin. You dig deep into creating and populating Data Marts using SSIS. The third part of the book digs deep into creating Cubes and Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) scripting.

Part four covers the Tabular BI Semantic Model and the Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) Language. Part five first gives a really nice introduction to data mining, including covering some of the common algorithms used in data mining. It then covers the Microsoft tools available for mining.

The last part of the book covers the client tools available for delivering business intelligence including Reporting Services, Excel PivotTable and PowerPivot, SharePoint PerformancePoint, and Power View.

I have listed the six parts and their chapters below.

Part I: Business Intelligence
Chapter 1. Equipping the Organization for Effective Decision Making
Chapter 2. Making the Most of What You've Got--Using Business Intelligence
Chapter 3. Seeking the Source--The Source of Business Intelligence
Chapter 4. Two, Two, Two Models in One--The BI Semantic Model
Chapter 5. First Steps--Beginning the Development of Business Intelligence

Part II: Defining Business Intelligence Structures
Chapter 6. Building Foundations--Creating Data Marts
Chapter 7. Transformers--Integration Service Structure and Components
Chapter 8. Fill 'er Up--Using Integration Services for Populating Data Marts

Part III: Working with a Multidimensional BI Semantic Model
Chapter 9. Cubism--Measures and Dimensions
Chapter 10. Bells and Whistles--Special Features of OLAP Cubes
Chapter 11. Writing a New Script--MDX Scripting
Chapter 12. Pulling It Out and Building It Up--MDX Queries

Part IV: Working with a Tabular BI Semantic Model
Chapter 13. Setting the Table--Creating a Tabular BI Semantic Model
Chapter 14. A Fancy Table--Tabular BI Semantic Model Advanced Features

Part V: Mining
Chapter 15. Panning for Gold--Introduction to Data Mining
Chapter 16. Building the Mine--Working with the Data Mining Model
Chapter 17. Spelunking--Exploration Using Data Mining

Part VI: Delivering
Chapter 18. Special Delivery--Microsoft Business Intelligence Client Tools
Chapter 19. Let's Get Together--Integrating Business Intelligence with Your Applications

The downloadable code is very well organized and usable. The databases each have instructions on getting them setup and configured. Like I said above I did the exercises of the things I had not done before, but used the downloads to explore solutions of concepts I already had a pretty good understanding of. All the databases restored without error and all the projects deployed without issue after changing some of the security setting for my local environment.

One topic missing from the book is Master Data Services (MDS), but Microsoft does not include MDS as part of their defined BI solutions either.

Some of my favorite parts of the books included the coverage of Change Data Capture, the complete coverage of the Control Flow items and Data Flow items available in the SSIS Toolbox, the detailed coverage of the BI Semantic Model (BISM), and the coverage of the Data Mining tools.

I honestly do not think you will find a better resource for learning the SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence Tools.

I have to say first off, that this book is extremely helpful in learning not only SQL Server 2012, but Business Intelligence practices as well. The writing is concise, and precise - meaning that it is easy to absorb the tremendous amount of information here quickly. Acronyms are spelled out frequently - usually at the beginning of each chapter, which while a little repetitive, really helps cement them in memory. The book is nicely divided into explanation, or lecture I'd call it, and guided exercises. The two combined really help to completely cover the topics, and it's separated and organized well so that if you're experienced with a certain topic or feature, you can either just read about it, or just do the exercise.

The book is fairly introductory, but moves to advanced topics quickly. You don't need extensive RDBMS experience to dive in, you don't need any programming experience, but if you don't know what a Primary Key and Foreign key are, you may struggle at times...

The only reason I didn't give this five stars is twofold. One is that I purchased the Kindle edition, and the screenshots and figures usually appear about a full page's text after they are referenced. In this time, the topic has usually shifted to something else, another operation, and what might have been a helpful graphic turns into an interruption. Additionally, the images are of such overly compressed and poor quality, you can actually notice the compression in standard view, and text is illegible when the image is enlarged.

The second reason for four stars, and something that may cause many others to also skip over large sections is the extensive coverage of individual windows. I guess some people might like it, and admittedly I have been using Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server Management Studio (SQSMS) for a while, but even so, I don't think that the import data wizard needs several pages and numerous graphics - perhaps as a tutorial to use it, but not as just a description of what it does. That's fairly obvious and too well documented on MSDN to occupy so much page space. This focus repeats with a tremendous amount of space dedicated to images of different VS2010 and SQSMS windows. The hands on exercise assume you can just open these up yourself and look at them. If there were arrows, circled buttons, an image guide to the window that would be one thing, but they're just screenshots, and very poor ones at that on the Kindle.

Finally, the only inconsistency I've noticed so far is that compression is limited to Enterprise edition, Developer gives an error message stating this. I'm not complaining about this, as it is probably an issue of publication date and Microsoft business decisions, but instead I note it because other than that, the book and exercises are extremely accurate!

The book covers SSAS, SSIS and SSRS, and it's clear that, even with 800 pages (half taken up by screenshots), it cannot be in-depth; instead, the goal is to get one's feet wet in each product, and get to a functional BI "deliverable". This is emphatically not a helicopter tour but a walk, as the approach is very hands-on, and the reader is asked to follow detailed sequences of steps to build a specific BI solution. There are three tentative "cons". First, the book is meant to be a stepping stone, and one can consider going with (three) specialist books on SSAS, SSIS and SSRS from the outset. (The leading candidate for the SSRS reference would be a book by Brian Larson himself, and SSIS could be covered by the book by Sarka, Lah and Jerkic). Second - and here I do dock a star - I think that some "helicopterness" would help. Early on, the book misses an opportunity to survey Microsoft's BI suite - I found this done nicely in "Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model" by Russo, Ferrari and Webb, for example. Then the (easy-on-the-author) running-through-the-screenshots commences, and I feel that this could have been made easier on the reader - for starters, by punctuating the more important steps. Finally, one can consider getting the older edition: the downsides of this approach deal with coverage of Tabular model, PerformancePoint and PowerView.