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

Monitoring processing performance


Processing Analysis Services dimensions and partitions is a resource-intensive operation. It should use all of the resources—CPU, memory, and disk I/O - available to Analysis Services. For this reason, it is important to be able to understand the impact of process operations on the operating system, as we have seen earlier on in this chapter.

When a database goes into production, Analysis Services processing usually takes place on a rigid schedule. We should monitor processing for two reasons:

  • Optimize processing times – usually we want to reduce the time required to process partitions and dimensions

  • Check for any increase in the processing window over time – the amount of time processing takes could increase over time, especially if we are running a Full Process on our database. We want to ensure that the amount of time processing takes won't exceed our assigned processing timeslot. To do that, we need to log information about the start and finish time...