Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Overview of this book

Microsoft's SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 is an OLAP server that allows users to analyze business data quickly and easily. However, designing cubes in Analysis Services can be a complex task: it's all too easy to make mistakes early on in development that lead to serious problems when the cube is in production. Learning the best practices for cube design before you start your project will help you avoid these problems and ensure that your project is a success. This book offers practical advice on how to go about designing and building fast, scalable, and maintainable cubes that will meet your users' requirements and help make your Business Intelligence project a success. This book gives readers insight into the best practices for designing and building Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 cubes. It also provides details about server architecture, performance tuning, security, and administration of an Analysis Services solution. In this book, you will learn how to design and implement Analysis Services cubes. Starting from designing a data mart for Analysis Services, through the creation of dimensions and measure groups, to putting the cube into production, we'll explore the whole of the development lifecycle. This book is an invaluable guide for anyone who is planning to use Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 in a Business Intelligence project.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

How to build a complete monitoring solution


In this chapter we have seen a set of tools and techniques that we can use to monitor an Analysis Services instance. We already mentioned that it is a good idea to save trace and performance counter information in log files or SQL Server tables, so we can perform more detailed analysis on them. The logical next step would be to build a complete monitoring solution that could provide reports, statistics and detailed information on all aspects of performance and usage, and that would be always running in the background, collecting data.

We could use all of this data as a source for a "performance and usage data mart", and use our favorite tools like Reporting Services and Analysis Services to build a BI solution for ourselves. If we have specific requirements or we have to integrate the monitoring solution with an existing system, designing a custom solution could be a good idea: for example, we might simply build Reporting Services reports that access...