Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Chapter 14. Designing for Performance

As any good English dictionary will tell you, performance has several possible meanings. In computer science, performance most often refers to the functioning efficiency of software and can relate to both speed and scalability. There are established standards and benchmarks to measure and compare the performance of products and services. Why care about performance? Well, consider your job performance; assuming you are an employee, your job review and, therefore, salary raise and bonus, will hinge on how well you do your job. To get the best work out of you, your manager needs to know what your interests are, what motivates you, and then assign appropriate tasks to get the maximum performance from you. Your manager will be rewarding you for your performance — usually in the currency you like most, cash.

It follows that if you are a data warehouse designer using Analysis Services you need to know how to get the best performance from the system so as to satisfy the customers. Just like your boss can push certain buttons to motivate you, Analysis Services provides various parameters that can be set to achieve maximum performance. As for server products such as Analysis Services, one can attribute performance results to how well server properties are tuned in the context of speed and scalability requirements.

Various factors influence the performance of an application. SQL Server's performance depends not only on the system (processors, memory, ...