Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence

Chapter 18Scaling the Business Intelligence Environment

The business intelligence environment contains many different products and servers. When performance issues arise and you have exhausted all other tuning options, it is time to look at scaling your solution. Scaling comes in many forms, but is typically hardware related. Scaling each of the business intelligence tools helps alleviate the performance issues and makes your users happy again.

This chapter explains the scaling options for your business intelligence environment. First, you learn what scaling means, when you should scale, and what benefits you gain from scaling. Then, you learn about the available scaling options and the different scaling architectures for several of the enterprise business intelligence tools. Putting all the pieces together lets you scale the entire business intelligence environment to provide the best solution for your users.

Why Would You Scale the Business Intelligence Environment?

As your reporting and analysis needs increase, your business intelligence solution must grow also. This growth is called scale and can come in two fashions: scale up or scale out. A scale-up approach means adding more memory, hardware, or processing power to allow the existing services to run more efficiently. A scale-out approach includes adding new servers or services to extend the number of nodes working to provide the service.

SCALING

Scaling is the process of increasing software or hardware to handle growth ...