What front end tools do you use?
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You may be able to contact some of the companies and ask them to show you a demo. Then you can decide which one looks the best.
Besides we don't buy a million dollar software without looking at it first.
Once you decide which one to go, you can ask them to help you build a little data warehouse and show it to your boss.
I know you can do that because some vendors contacted me and willing to work with me to build something to show my boss. But first you have to know what you want to show your boss. The vendor will ask you this question.
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Thanks for mentioning my favorite comic strip. Speaking of front-end tools and Dilbert:
As Trey correctly pointed out: "There are other front ends that consume SSAS to varying degrees (Business Objects, Cognos, Strategy Companion, Panorama and others) but in many of these cases their parity with the full SSAS feature set is just not there, yet."
Mosha Pasumansky, who leads the Microsoft BI development team (and is an unbiased database person, as opposed to a biased vendor rep like me
), had this to say about our (Strategy Companion) Analyzer product and its support for SSAS 2005: "I have seen slick Web-based thin browsers before, but this one looks absolutely amazing. It is pure ASP.NET/DHTML and is written specifically for Analysis Services 2005. There is support for almost every client-oriented feature we have: mutiple translations, display folders, KPIs, etc." (from Mosha's blog at http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mosha/search.aspx?q=Strategy+Companion&p=1)
Hope this helps.
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Linda said:
Thanks, but that's my problem. I wouldn't be building the data warehouse becuase I don't have the time (being the only DBA), and the 'developers' are not familiar with DTS or Analysis Services. Gotta work with what we've got and what we know, I guess.
That's pretty much our situation here. The developers not only don't know it but are too busy with other things to do it. And while we do have more than one DBA, we're swamped with new projects. Still, this isn't going to get done unless someone steps up to the plate and does more than talk about it.I look at it this way. It's a fantastic training opportunity for me. When I first started looking at DBA jobs, there were so many senior DBA and DBA / Data Miner jobs that it wasn't funny. And the Data Miner - Data Warehouse DBA jobs out weighed the "normal" positions. If I find myself having to look for a new job, I don't ever want to be in that situation again, where there's a plethoria of jobs out there but I don't qualify for a single one of them. So I take every available second while I'm waiting for jobs to run or backups to restore or queries to process to look at online threads, read articles and brush up on theories that I don't know about (like BI).
We're going to need a data warehouse before we can even indulge in KPIs and Dashboards, so that's the stuff I'm looking at now. But I still like hearing about what tools others are looking at because my Boss wants to know what's out there and what it can do before we get to the point of having to make our front-end tool decision. He's even floated the idea of designing our own Dashboard from scratch, but then realized we don't have any Developers free to work on such a long-term project.
Anyway, thanks again to everyone who's responded to this thread and if you guys have more thoughts, links, etc., please continue to post them.
), had this to say about our (Strategy Companion) Analyzer product and its support for SSAS 2005: 
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