Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

OLAP Performance

Performance is a big emphasis of SSAS. Usage-based aggregation is at the heart of much of what you can do to help in this area. In addition, the proactive caching mechanism in SSAS has allowed much of what was previously a bottleneck (and a slowdown) to be circumvented.

When designing cubes for deployment, you should consider the data scope of all the data accesses (that is, all the OLAP queries that will ever touch the cube). You should only build a cube that is big enough to handle these known data scopes. If you don’t have requirements for something, you shouldn’t build it. This helps keep things a smaller, more manageable size (that is, smaller cubes), which translates into faster overall performance for those who use the ...