Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

9.10. AMO Warnings

AMO (Analysis Services Management Object) Warnings is the name given to a set of best practices built into the Analysis Services object model and exposed by the design tools. There's a lot of history behind this feature. When working on the 2005 release of SQL Server Analysis Services, we introduced the notion of real-time designer validations of errors. These validations were surfaced via red squiggly lines under the offending object. The validations proved to be a real benefit to cube designers because they allowed for a very tight temporal correlation between an action and the result of that action. Practically speaking, it's much easier to correct errors as they happen, while the action that triggered the error is still fresh in your mind, rather than doing it infrequently (such as on build or deploy) and then having to remember what you were thinking when you made the change that caused the error and to parse through potentially many such errors.

All of this formed the backdrop of the AMO Warnings feature. After the release of the SSAS 2005, it became clear that the product was very complex, with a very open-ended and sometimes overly optimistic set of tools, and dispersed best practices (blogs, forums, whitepapers, and so on) that were not immediately obvious to the average user. To this end, work was done to pull together the most important best design practices (you learn the best practices in Chapter 14) and place this information in the product via ...