Analysis Services for DBA's.

A lot of job postings these days for SQL DBA's list the requirement of
Analysis Services. Not having any experience with it I'm wondering what
exactly is meant? Of course its going to vary from company to company, but I
really have no clue what they mean in general? Is it cube design? MDX query
writing? Simply backing up? To be clear, Im asking in regards specificically
for a DBA, not a Developer.
TIA, ChrisR
Chris - not that I'm an expert at all, but I have done 2 short contracts in
AS/SQL and might share these experiences. In both I had to design the cubes
and staging database structure and manage the population of the staging
database (DTS). The determination of fact granularity and measures takes
ages and I was expected to do that. All in all this was the main part of my
work. We created some sample reports using Excel PivotTables and ProClarity
and once they were up and running they wanted to take time to design the
rest of the queries. I showed them a little MDX because it was of interest
to me and the tools seem slightly limited out of the box ("Generate" was one
particularly useful function which ProClarity couldn't do at the time) but
in my 2 roles MDX wasn't a priority and unless you are using it every day
you're unlikely to become good at it anyway IMHO. Since then I've met a guy
at a large multinational insurance firm who does all their data warehousing
using AS and he has never touched MDX at all. My guess therefore is that
cube design and population are the main skills, and for report-writing it is
important to have familiarity with the main front-end tools - (as far as I
know Cognos and ProClarity).
Cheers,
Paul Ibison