The first session of the morning for me was Adam Jorgensen’s “0 to SSAS” presentation. Before this event, I had never had the privilege of attending one of Adam’s sessions and I do not work directly with SSAS, but his reputation as a good speaker enticed me to attend. Needless to say that I was not disappointed. Below are some random things that I learned from Adam:

• AS is the most powerful engine in the SQL Server line (designed to do table scans which would kill the DB engine)
• The Standard Edition for SQL Server is missing some of the AS functionality.
• AS uses BIDS aka Visual Studio with different project types
• AS works best with the STAR schema but might get the job done if your snowflake schema is not too diluted and you do not mind manually adding the dimensions.
• “Add related tables” will only find one level of relations which makes the STAR schema optimized for this.
• It was not said but I am guessing that the constellation schema would kill the engine 😉