Reporting Services 2008 was able to respond to 3–4 times the total number of users and their requests on the same hardware without HTTP 503 Service Is Unavailable errors compared with Reporting Services 2005, regardless of the type of renderer. In stark...

Due to the improvements in the Windows Server 2008 memory manager related to the change in the algorithm for scanning pages in memory, SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services performed equally well during both partition and dimension processing with or without...

SQLCAT members have published several tools on Codeplex and other places. They are all consolidated here at SQLCAT.com. http://sqlcat.com/toolbox/default.aspx

SQL Server 2008 is just around the corner. SQLCAT has been working with our customers and partners implementing pre-release builds. We have a lot good lessons learned to share, here are some of the upcoming best practices papers: · Index Defragmentation...

The database system in a company that is growing internationally must support multilingual characters in tables with Unicode data types. Existing d atabases that support only non-Unicode information must be migrate d from non-Unicode data type to Unicode...

Many Analysis Services applications query members to populate a dropdown or find those that match some criteria – starting or ending with a string, existing with other members, having a member property with a certain value, whatever. For example, say...

In some cases, it is not obvious or easy to create a default measure in AS2005 cubes. In fact, there is no default measure by default, which can lead to long query times for queries that specify no measures. We have seen slow behavior with several query...

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...

Four new best practices articles are available at the SQL Server Best Practices site on Technet ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb331794.aspx ). Two of the articles are on Analysis Services Processing and Querying best practices: ...

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...

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...

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...

As promised way back in August, here is the first installment of a series of blogs on database performance from the application point of view. Complex screens can cause database performance problems when each control (grid, list box, etc) on the screen...

Question 1: How can SQL Server 2005 OnLine Piecemeal Restore improve availability? Question 2: Can I recover a single object such as a table or specific partition(s) from a partitioned table? Answer: The question is how to get the greatest...

Author : Shaun Tinline-Jones Reviewers: Lubor Kollar; Conor Cunningham; Steve Howard; Kun Cheng; James Podgorski; Jimmy May; Joseph Sack; Welly Lee; Neeraj Joshi; Keith Bauer Introduction We recently assisted a global ISV to address a performance...

Written by : Ed Katibah, Milan Stojic, Michael Rys, Nicholas Dritsas Technical reviewers : Chuck Heinzelman Introduction : Spatial Point Data queries require particular tuning efforts to enhance performance and improve overall application throughput...

By: Nicholas Dritsas Reviewers: James Podgorski, Olivier Matrat, Sanjay Mishra Overview Azure’s Iaas VMs plus Virtual Networks can be used to configure easily a set of servers/VMs to host the main components of a BI solution. This process...

A new version of the Partition Management Utility for SQL Server is now available on Codeplex at http://sqlpartitionmgmt.codeplex.com/ . This is a tool that helps you create necessary staging tables and indexes and associated check constraints, to support...

For my #SQLPASS Summit 2012 talk SQLCAT: Big Data – All Abuzz About Hive ( slides available to all | recording available to PASS Summit 2012 attendees ) I showed a mash-up of Hive, SQL Server, and Excel data that had been imported to PowerPivot...

When I talk to people about adding self-service BI to their company's environment I generally get a list of reasons why it won't work. Some things I commonly hear: I can't get anyone in IT or on the business side to even try it. The business...

One of the great enhancements in Microsoft's HDInsight distribution of Hadoop is the ability to store and access Hadoop data on an Azure Blob Store. We do this via the HDFS API extension called Azure Storage Vault (ASV). This allows you to persist data...

Author: Kevin Cox Contributors: Min He,Steve Lindell Reviewers: Sanjay Mishra, Juergen Thomas, Jimmy May Creating an availability group needs pings and status checks across the different servers involved. This accounts for approximately 500...

You can check out the three new Best Practices Articles Predeployment I/O Best Practices http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/pdpliobp.mspx by Mike Ruthruff Partial Database Availability http://www.microsoft.com/technet...

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/default.mspx Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. Drawing on the extensive experience and expertise...

Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Using SAN Snapshots