I used to work on a BI and reporting platform on the Microsoft stack (SSIS + SSAS + SSRS).. Even got decent at writing MDX. Thing is, you needed beasty servers

I used to work on a BI and reporting platform on the Microsoft stack (SSIS + SSAS + SSRS).. Even got decent at writing MDX. Thing is, you needed beasty servers to get good performance (event with loads of cube modeling optimizations), but that was rarely the case... This was in the physical servers era, mind you, even started on 32 bit Win Server, which choked up pretty fast... I switched company around when tabular OLAP models started replacing multi-dimensional models, so I never got to understand those. MS SSAS got replaced with Qlik / Tableau AFAIK.