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

Performance tuning methodology


When doing performance tuning there are certain steps you should follow to allow you to measure the effect of any changes you make to your cube, its calculations or the query you're running:

  • Wherever possible, test your queries in an environment that is identical to your production environment. Otherwise ensure that the size of the cube and the server hardware you're running on is at least comparable, and running the same build of Analysis Services.

  • Make sure that no-one else has access to the server you're running your tests on. You won't get reliable results if someone else starts running queries at the same time as you.

  • Make sure that the queries you're testing with are equivalent to the ones that your users want to have tuned. As we'll see, you can use Profiler to capture the exact queries your users are running against the cube.

  • Whenever you test a query, run it twice: first on a cold cache, and then on a warm cache. Make sure you keep a note of the time...