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

Summary


In this chapter we spent most of our time describing the key resources that we have to monitor for Analysis Services: Memory, CPU, and I/O. These resources are controlled by the operating system, and for this reason we looked at how Analysis Services interacts with the operating system and with other processes that may also be competing for resources. We discovered what the most important operating system performance counters are for monitoring an Analysis Services installation, and what tools we have available for accessing them.

After that, we explored various techniques for monitoring processing, query activity and usage of Analysis Services. We focused on using tools like SQL Server Profiler, ASTrace, Activity Viewer and MDX Studio; we also looked at the detailed information provided by traces, performance counters and dynamic management views for each of the monitoring scenarios.

Finally, we discussed building a complete monitoring solution and pointed out that such a solution...