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 usage


Apart from monitoring the performance of processing and queries, another important activity is monitoring the overall usage of Analysis Services. At any given point in time we might want to know who is connected to Analysis Services and who is running queries, for example because we might want to warn users that we're about to restart the service for maintenance reasons. Also, in the long term, it is interesting to know which cubes and hierarchies are used and which are not, what type of queries are being run, who the most active users are, which users never use the system, and so on.

To monitor usage we can use the same tools that we've used in previous sections.

Monitoring Usage with Trace Data

Collecting trace data in a SQL Server table can be a very useful way to determine the most active users, or the most frequent or expensive queries, over a long period of time. The most important event to capture is Query End / MDX Query: The Duration column for this event can be used...