We are proud to announce that SQLCAT will continue with the SSAS Maestros course in June and July in Redmond and Madrid. SSAS Maestros 1.2 Courses Join us for a five-day deep-dive course on Analysis Services 2008 R2 UDM and join the SSAS Maestro Program. Prepared and presented by SQLCAT , top...

by Denny Lee As many of you know from the various blogs, whitepapers, and conferences from SQLCAT, there is a big obsession or compulsion toward I/O by various members of SQLCAT. If you’re not already familiar with this topic, definitely reference Mike Ruthruff ’s whitepaper Predeployment...

by Denny Lee (SQL Customer Advisory Team), Daniel Yu (SQL Marketing) Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of questions, tweets, and rumors about the SSAS Maestros program – some notable blogs include Kasper de Jonge’s Do you have what it takes to become SSAS Maestro and Vidas...

Author: Thomas Kejser Reviewers: Peter Adshead, Nicholas Dritsas, Sanjay Nayyar, John Desch, Kevin Cox, Akshai Mirchandani, Anne Zorner In this blog we will describe an important optimization that you should apply to cubes that are processed often and have CREATE SET commands in the calculation script...

Gemini is the code name for the new breakthrough Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities being delivered in the SQL Server 2008 R2 release. Gemini enables end users to build BI applications by integrating data from a variety of sources, modeling, refining and analyzing the data, adding business...

If you have experimented with cube design in SQL Server 2008, you will probably have run into the new AMO design warnings in Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS). We find that these warnings help customers a lot: they allow them to quickly analyze your cube for classic design mistakes...

It's a new year and, with it, we come bearing gifts! We have a pretty significant update to SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer . It contains many new and updated rules for Analysis Services, a few important rules for the Relational Engine, a couple bug fixes for the UI and command line tools. And...

Many-to-many dimension relationships in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) enable you to easily model complex source schemas and provide great analytical capabilities. This capability frequently comes with a substantial cost in query performance due to the runtime join required by Analysis Services...

As noted within the Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide , there are some niche situations where setting the Processing Group property to ByTable provides more optimal processing than the default value of ByAttribute. In a customer scenario, we had discovered that they had two dimensions (each...

Default SSAS behavior can sometimes result in small queries being slowed down by concurrently running big queries. Recently in working with a customer, we observed the most common queries when run by themselves took about 1 second and some ad-hoc queries against their 110 GB cube took about 3 minutes...

For those of you whom want to know a little more about precision considerations for Analysis Services users, please check out this recently released whitepaper at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=bae8beec-9892-4ecd-a9db-292254895f9c&displaylang=en . This white paper covers...

If you want to browse the cube and validate dimensions, hierarchies and calculations using the data from only one partition, here is what you can do. Deploy the new cube solution, run a process structure for the cube and then process only one of the partitions. Process Structure will process all the...

If a report does not use formatted cell values, query time can be reduced. An example is a Reporting Services report that does its own formatting and therefore would not use the formatted values from SSAS. By returning only the value of the cell and not its formatted value in MDX, you can achieve better...

Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Using SAN Snapshots

Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services There are a variety of things that you can do to improve the performance of an individual MDX query. To begin, you must identify the source(s) of the performance bottlenecks in the execution of a poorly...

If you are view the XMLA script that is generated for an Analysis Services database, you will notice that there are both ID and NAME attributes. The reason Analysis Services has this differentiation is so one could rename an Olap database (which you could not do officially within Analysis Services 2000...

Author: Denny Lee Contributors: John Desch, Kevin Cox Reviewers: Robert Zare DRILLTHROUGH MDX Overview DRILLTHROUGH MDX is a very powerful way to drillthrough to your original data source of detail data that make up the aggregations that you are looking at. For more information on enabling...

Goal This document describes how to build Create Cache commands. Create Cache for Analysis Services (AS) was introduced in SP2 of SQL Server 2005. It can be used to make one or more queries run faster by populating the OLAP storage engine cache first. Some customers have found certain queries...

Summary: SSAS uses partitions to contain cube data. Small cubes might use only one, but for non trivial cubes, cube designers will create partitions based on ease of managing data and to split groups of data. This document discusses how the server uses "slices" to examine partitions at query time. The...

Overview SQL Server’s 2005 Analysis Services has introduced several changes to the MDX queries syntax that can lead to better performance than the equivalent AS 2000 queries. Here is a list of tips and tricks as well as best practices on how to get better performance from your MDX queries in...