Craig,

 I simply have to thank you big time for these videos.  They have given me a tremendous head start.  During the last 8 years I have developed an in house data warehouse for a large financial company's contact center.  Started in Excel, migrated to Access for a few years, and today it's housed in SQL 2000 with an asp.Net presentation layer.  I've always been afraid of OLAP since experiencing my company's horrible implementation of COGNOS.  So I've been recreating a lot of cube functionality through dynamic SQL and a multitude of other methods in my 2 dimensional world.  The warehouse contains everything from quality data to IVR data to data straight off of our switch.  I've always wanted to bridge the gap between the contact center and our transaction processing areas.  All of the data is at my fingertips after years of political battles.   And let me tell you, the transactional data is massive.  Hence our Cognos situation (very very bad - I could go on for hours).  I was at a point where I  thought a reasonable solution would never be possible in our "complex" world. 

After watching your videos I am ready to tackle the situation.  I have absolutely devoured them over the last 24 hours.  Watched every single one...except for ProClarity.  Tomorrow morning I am going to create my first DSV and follow your instructions until I own and rule the entire company data universe.  If I can score one little victory using the SQL 2000 server I have now, I'm sure I can secure funding for SQL 2008 and an upgrade from VS 2005.  All I need to do is create a cube with some time based heirarchies containing both transactional and call center data.  My V.P. has been throwing around the term "balanced scorecard" but I don't think any of the management team know exactly what that means.  I plan on knocking them out with some new BI tools.

I'm not sure why these videos are free.  You should definitely be paid for them.  But if it's marketing, well, it works.  Just yesterday morning I was researching PostgreSQL for possible implementation to replace our aging database software.  I doubt it can do BI this well.  So now I'm back on the Mr. Softy train.  As expensive as it is.  I should be able to justify the cost with some sound BI tools though.  Not to mention, advance my skillset.  I'll be an MDX pro within a year or so.  :-)

Seriously.  Thank you very much for your efforts.  They've made a huge difference for me personally.  I look forward to your next installments.