Interesting commentary on the above thread. I try to be technology agnostic with all BI tools and am currently running into clients hitting the limitations of Cognos cubes. I wouldn't recommend building a large scalable BI solution using SSAS/SSRS when the tools are lacking a manageable meta data layer to produce a self serve reporting environment. (I do recommend the MS platform only if there are cost factors limiting an implementation - you get what you pay for) In addition, once a Cognos cube reaches the physical limitations of partitioned cubes - my expectation is another platform like Terradata or Netezza would be required.

Would be interested in hearing other new solutions before recommending the limited and labor intensive implementation of SSAS?

Regards
John