Microsoft® OLAP / BI Solutions Practice
Our Microsoft® OLAP /BI Solutions Practice provides top-level technical expertise to IT organizations and ISVs. The practice is led by George Spofford, author of MDX Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and Hyperion Essbase (2nd Edition) and co-author of Microsoft OLAP Solutions. We have been working with Microsoft's OLAP and Analysis Services since the earliest betas. All of our work revolves around ensuring that you have the solution that you need, and that you fully understand what we produce. We can apply our knowledge in tandem with your staff, augmenting their knowledge as well as their time.
We have three main areas in this practice:
If you would like to discuss your solution needs, please send email to George Spofford (gspofford (AT) dsslab (DOT) com or call us.
Analytical Design and Implementation
We have worked with analytical systems for a variety of industries and with a variety of needs. Your organization may be at any stage in the process from defining needs to having a design that needs implementation. We can assist you in moving from where you are to where you want to be.
Strategy, Requirements, and Analytical Design
At a strategic level, we work with you to define the high-value metrics and analyses that will help you make better decisions. We will help you create and consolidate requirements from an analytical and physical perspective. We will identify the set of related tools (front-end and back-end) that can meet your requirements.Logical and Physical Design
From a set of requirements, we will construct a logical and physical design that provides high performance and clean access from end-user tools. We understand how to leverage all the capabilities of Analysis Services and SQL Server, including techniques to encapsulate and hide complexity. We understand the technical details of developing a relational database that properly supports the dimensions, cubes and models of Analysis Services. We understand how to implement and analyze the complex relationships and large quantities of data such as are found in health care, insurance, and finance.Implementation
We will build the databases, set up the ongoing maintenance tasks, implement any necessary user interface configuration or code, and help you set up the appropriate end-user tools for the users at all levels of use. We will ensure secure availability to all system users. We will train your staff to understand what we have done, and transfer our system knowledge to them, making them more productive for your organization in the process.
Database and Application Optimization and Remediation
Many times, an organization will develop a analytical database only to find as the system scales up, performance becomes terrible or the ability to add new analyses becomes difficult to fit with the existing design. Applying more hardware to solve performance issues is usually a costly alternative to a clean and flexible design. We will review the design and implementation of a system and its fit to analytical needs, from the underlying RDBMS structures to the MDX used to retrieve the data and implement the analyses. Depending on the skills and available resources in your own company, we can re-factor and re-implement the system, or walk your personnel through the process as they perform it themselves.
Our extensive experience with the product gives us a unique perspective on how the structure of the database and the MDX that analyzes the data interact. This is the most frequent area for improvement in database designs. There are many features of Analysis Services that can be combined for great impact on system performance and flexibility, and our services in optimizing and remediating can get an application over the hump.
Custom Development for IT Organizations and ISVs
We provide custom software development services for all areas around the use of Microsoft's analytical platforms, including end-user tools, administrative and maintenance interfaces, data population (ETL) tools, and packaging the analytics inside applications for resale. For end user tools, while third-party interface tools provide a vendor-supported means to connect your users to the analyses and data, frequently an analytical consumer needs more than is provided out-of-the-box. We provide custom development services for third-party interfaces, but we also provide custom interface development for applications that cannot be supported by a third party, or for when licensing third-party components is not desirable.
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