Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

14.6. Summary

After reading this chapter, on hearing the very word performance, your head should swell with visions of highly performing, scalable systems, each optimized to fulfill its designated mission — never again will this word simply evoke images of entertainment provided by a theatrical group! To build a system that scales up and performs well, you have to consider high- and low-level issues. At the high level, aggregation design forms the foundation for an optimally performing OLAP system; take the time to analyze the requirements of the application to get this step right. Another high-level consideration is the type of storage you choose for your system, be it MOLAP, HOLAP, or ROLAP. At lower levels there are many ways to optimize design, like avoiding the use of unnecessary attributes that are never used in customer queries. They can waste precious system data storage and slow down both processing performance and query performance. You learned other lower-level issues, about natural and unnatural hierarchies, and about how you should specify one-to-many relationships whenever possible for better query performance and reduced system data space requirements. You even dove down deep into tuning the Analysis Services instance by changing certain server properties. Finally, you learned how aggregations can be created and how they help to achieve better query performance. We are confident you will exploit all the best practices provided in this chapter and design you OLAP ...