Adventures with Denali CTP3–Part 1

I usually only realize how slow downloads can be when I’m eager to begin working with the item being downloaded. The hour it took to download the AdventureWorks sample databases felt far longer than it actually was.
One thing that surprised me was that the downloads for the databases were only the MDF (data) file – the log file was not included. After fiddling unsuccessfully with attaching it using the UI in Management Studio (no, I didn’t think of deleting the log file name from the file list in the UI – I’d assumed it was required and didn’t realize that if you did not list a logfile that it automatically treated it as an ATTACH_REBUILD_LOG command), I finally decided that it would be sensible to actually read the instructions. Technet provided me a very simple query to attach the database
CREATE DATABASE AdventureWorks2008R2 ON (FILENAME = 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\AdventureWorks2008R2_Data.mdf') FOR ATTACH_REBUILD_LOG ;
Worked like a charm.
I modified the query and attached the AdventureWorksDWDenali database in a similar manner then ran a few quick SELECT queries on various tables to see what they contained. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the OLAP database’s dimDate table contained English, French and Spanish day and month names.
I then launched the BI Development Studio and opened the AdventureWorksDWMultidimensionalDenali project (provided in samples pages on Codeplex). I verified the connection information in the datasource and successfully deployed the cube.
If everyone knew how easy this was, I’d probably be out of a job.