New Analysis Services dedicated blog to take notice of -
http://www.sqljunkies.com/WebLog/edwardm/ started by Edward Melomed. I know Edward for the last 12 years or so - he is one of the original 5 Panorama employees that started OLAP Services team in Microsoft. Edward is Program Manager in the Analysis Services team, specializing on things like scalability, performance, management and storage engine related features. He is known in OLAP community as one of the authors of the "
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services" book and as most active member of the MSDN Analysis Services forum (
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=83&SiteID=1). There is definitely a lot we all of us can learn from him - welcome to the blogosphere, Edward !
After answering quite a few questions on the Microsoft forum and getting some common questions regarding connectively to analysis services 2005 it is time to have a common place for look for information about how to troubleshoot connectivity:
I thought it was ironic, because I remember years ago when I first started to answer questions in the public newsgroup about OLAP Services 7.0, most of the questions were about connectivity too, which ultimatelly led to the first posting on this subject on the
http://www.mosha.com/msolap site. I wonder why the most basic functionality - just connecting to the server - is still the most problematic, no matter that 3 versions of the product passed and underlying technology, network protocols, data formats and ports are all different...