It’s only a matter of time before I actually start blogging regularly again.  No, really.  The problem is that I’ve been working on a book, albeit with two co-authors, and we’ve been in crunch mode for a while.  It’ll be over soon.  And the book will kick ass…if we ever finish it.

Between the book, a new job (now almost 15 months old) and a new son (now almost 14 months old), being overwhelmed has been a theme in my life for a while now.

The Internet overwhelms me too, and it annoys me.  There’s too much content, and too little editing (and I realize that this blog is complicit in that phenomenon).  One day people are going to remember why the hell they used to read trade and technical magazines.  They’ll remember that editors culled through stuff for them, and packaged it up in relatively small publications, that came out at a reasonable frequency.  You could read them from cover to cover and even wait in anticipation for the next issue.

Call me a Luddite, but that was a useful format.  It was respectful of my time.  And it was respectful of the authors’ work too.  Blogs and RSS aggregators and all the articles posted daily to the Web by the major trade pubs don’t offer that respect.  And that is a drag on productivity in the industry which impacts negatively on the economy.

So my quest has been to find outlets in the new medium that help me approximate the discriminating taste and editorial efficiency of the old magazine format.

I’ve only just begun, but I have found one very useful resource: Slashdot Review.  It’s a ten minute daily evening audio podcast (it comes out once each weekday evening as well as most Sundays) that summarizes the day’s most interesting posts on Slashdot.  It’s an extremely time-efficient way to keep abreast of tech industry current events, and the audio format will give your monitor-sore eyes a rest.

Slashdot Review’s host, Andrew McCaskey, is unaffiliated with Slashdot, though he’s an avid reader.  He adds his own articulate opinions at times, and educates his listeners in podcasting trends and technologies.  He also puts out a show with high production value, and that makes it fun to listen to.  I listen on my PC, my Creative Zen Micro audio player, and in my living room on my Media Center PC.  By the way, the show’s content does exist in blog form, and the podcast RSS feed I supplied in the last paragraph contains text that accompanies each mp3 "enclosure."

I’m going to keep looking for resources like this.  I’m now more hopeful that the Internet’s content pollution can be tamed.

Short of spell-checking and proofreading, work on the "Advanced OLAP" chapter for my upcoming book on SQL Server 2005 (with co-authors Stephen Forte and Bill Zack) is done.  This one chapter (which we may end splitting into two) covers an array of new features in Analysis Services 2005. 

I believe very strongly that with this release of SQL Server, all Microsoft-centric developers should learn at least a little about OLAP.  The biggest reason for this is that building cubes, building application functionality around them and keeping them up-to-date is now something that any good database administrator and/or developer can do.

It's time to step up.  To explain why, let me just outline some common-sense principles that this release is based upon.  They make the technology more accessible to you, and to the BI market in general:

• Keeping your cubes up-to-date shouldn't involve a lot of work.  Proactive Caching, which in its basic form can be configured with a Wizard, can be used to maximize availability of your cube and currency of its data.
• You shouldn't need to be an OLAP expert to build simple cubes. It's not just that the tools used to build cubes are eaiser to use and more sophisticated, it's that the principles themselves are easier.  Simple things are simple to do.  Parent-child dimensions are easier, ordering of members in a dimension is easier, supporting multiple hierarchies is much more straightforward, etc.
• You shouldn't need to be an analyst or statician to use the cubes that get built.  Built in visualization tools (KPIs) make cube data much easier to comprehend.  Display folders allow for an immediate taxonomy of what can be an otherwise overwhelming list of dimensions and measures.  And new perspectives make it simple to publish a subset of a cube and make it look like a separate cube to client applications.
• You shouldn't need high-level permissions on your database to build a cube on it.  Analysis Services 2005 just needs your untransformed tables, views or stored procedures.  Special queries stored in the AS database's Data Source View can help you transform the data if need be, and single tables can be used for multiple dimensions, so you don't need to create multiple views on the same table.  You can even use your fact table as a dimension table.
• OLAP development should be more like other development.  When you do go beyond simple cubes, and you need to write some server-side MDX code to make things work the way you want, you should have development and debugging support akin to what most developers are used to.  Designing cubes inside Visual Studio makes this possible, and it's really cool!
• Learning MDX should be less necessary and less difficult.  OLAP/MDX developers now have the same kind of drag and drop code generation and Intellisense support (albeit limited) that other devs do.  They also have access to a huge library of templates for both server-side MDX expressions and client-side MDX queries.  I'm all for coding into a blank page, but if used properly, tools and templates help you learn.  MDX is a bear; that shouldn't be compounded with a velvet rope and a bunch of bouncers denying you entrance to the learning club and, thankfully, it no longer is.
• OLAP reporting should be easy.  Check!  Reporting Services' support for OLAP (and data mining) is strong, with an MDX query designer built right into the product.  That same designer is now built into SQL Server Management Studio too, making Analysis Services a first class client inside SSMS, right alongside SQL's relational engine.
• There should still be cool stuff for the experts.  Don't worry OLAP experts, your franchise has not been eradicated.  There's a slew of features that you, and only you, can help customers realize the full value of.  What this release does is lower barriers to entry, and most likely increase the market and demand for your expertise.

'Nuff said.  If you want to learn more, you gotta wait for the book.

Code and slides for my ASP.NET 2.0 Data Binding session can be found here.

Code and slides for my ADO MD.NET session can be found here.

Give as much as you can, as quickly as you can, to organizations that can deploy help quickly.  I recommend the Salvation Army.  Click here to be directed to their donation server #5.  (I figure it's less busy than servers 1 through 4.)  If it's busy, keep clicking.  Or call 1-800-SAL-ARMY, and get ready to hit redial.

When you're done donating, if you feel like it, read the rest of this post.

This country and its government have no shortage of skills when it comes to the logistics of deploying personnel and matériel to take on adverse, emergent, violent situations.  We've done so recently in Afghanistan and Iraq; we even did so in Iran after the earthquake there.  That we can't, or won't, do so on our own shores is a poignant, staggering demonstration of our double standards and skewed priorities.

Rescue and recovery in the Gulf Coast states is concretely in our national interest.  The President should respond to the emergency there with at least as much resolve and passion as he has to situations where arguments of national security have been more abstract.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, in his interview with WWL radio last night, exhibited appropriate outrage and acrimony.  He and his city's most needy people have been so far treated by the Federal government as expendable.  We can all see news footage of babies without food and water, of dead bodies sitting curbside, of people appealing, desperately and in vain, for help.  Why the full force of this country's resources and generosity have not been brought to bear to help these people simply defies explanation.  If Nagin is politically targeted by anybody for speaking his mind, it will compound the already negligent, disgraceful response to this tragedy.

When this is all over, people need to hold their elected representatives (all of them) to task for this.  This can't happen again.  Not like this.