A nice basic introduction!

I myself have wrestled with AS2005 in practice and seeing how easy others run into problems given all the post here are about just that, I get heavy Deja Vu. Some things are good but from a modeling, querying and maintainability point I never accepted AS2005 as a finished product (not even as beta in fact).

All I can say is that if you are interested in digging deeper into multi-dimensional modeling, be prepared to have major setbacks on anything but the most basic examples. Spacial thinking and reasoning in 5 dimensions (so along 5 axis) and more is pretty straightforward if you know multi-dimensional arrays from programming or have done complex queries in SQL within a star diagram.

After all you don't need to visualise the dimensions to understand them and you don't need to perform rotations and other complex geometry within that multi-dimensional space to collect meaningful data. That would realy be impossible for all but maybe 2 humans on this planet that can deal with 5 dimensions without computerised visualisation assistance.

The often untold truth is that AS works nothing like all examples let you think. Also prepare for the case that a lot of information you read is likely to contain mistakes or has contradictions with other sources of information and instead of help they can just as easily put you on the wrong track.

At least this is what I found a few years back when I had a solution that worked well in SQL and I understood in full. The project was to move all the data into AS2005 so reporting would become easyer for the customer as they could use their own tools instead of using our application. The story ended with sticking to SQL for reporting as having user readable reports contradicted with the requirement of querying the same data via MDX to get application interpretable table (2D) results.

I won't spoil the exercise, just make sure you understand every step of the way and do heavy testing. Query results can become quite deceiving in that things seem to work, but turn out not to under certain conditions. Logic the way you are used to in SQL does not apply when it comes to MDX!

I am bound to get some flak over this by AS folks, but even people I asked that *know* had to guess a lot of the time. They just try it in a data browser and if the answer seems ok, they accept it as working...not good enaugh for me I am afraid.