Acknowledgments

Thanks to the great team at Microsoft Press who made this book happen: Eric Stroo for first recognizing the potential for this book, Ben Ryan for seeing the book through to completion from the acquisitions end, Devon Musgrave for keeping the project moving and the text flowing, Jack Beaudry for conscientiously checking the technical accuracy, Sandra Haynes for simplifying incomprehensible and convoluted sentence structures, and Elizabeth Hansford for making the pages look beautiful in print.

Thanks to the great team at OLAP Train and Aspirity for breaking ground in understanding and teaching the concepts in this book: Tom Chester for being the first to plunge into the brave new world of what was then called OLAP Services, Sara Bergseth for being a superb role model and teacher, Hilary Feier for willingly plunging into experiments and arguments to find out how things really work, and Rand Heer for his wisdom when difficult decisions needed to be made.

Special thanks to the Plato dev team for their insights and support, especially to Corey Salka, Amir Netz, Ariel Netz, Mosha Pasumansky, Thierry D’Hers, and Marin Bezic.