Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

14.5. Scalability Optimizations

Scalability with respect to Analysis Services indicates how well Analysis Services handles parameter value increases for dimension sizes, number of dimensions, size of the cube, number of databases, and number of concurrent users — all of which affect server behavior. Analysis Services provides several scalability parameters, such as handling a large number of partitions or a dimension with a large number of members (>5 million). In this section you learn about optimizations relevant specifically to scalability of Analysis Services.

For Analysis Services 2008 you can control the number of queries executed concurrently with the advanced configuration property ThreadPool\Query\MaxThreads. The default value 10 works well for most scenarios, but on a machine with many processors it should be increased, or for scenarios combining short-running queries with long-running queries there may be benefits from decreasing the value.

14.5.1. Configuring Server Configuration Properties

Several configuration properties are provided by Analysis Services with which to fine-tune the server. The default values for these properties have been set for the most common scenarios. However, for specific requirements you might have to change these settings to achieve the best performance from Analysis Services. In general, Microsoft recommends you change configuration settings only when working with Microsoft product support. Documentation of all the supported server configuration ...