Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services with MDX and DAX

Chapter 10

Designing Mulitdimensional BISM for Performance

What's in this chapter?

• Fine-tuning your dimensions
• Fine-tuning your cube
• Optimizing processing performance
• Designing aggregations
• Managing aggregations
• Scalability optimizations

As any good English dictionary can 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. Established standards and benchmarks 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, salary raise, and bonus 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. Your manager rewards 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 to satisfy the customers. Just like your boss can push certain buttons to motivate you, Analysis Services provides various parameters that you can set to achieve maximum performance. For server products such as Analysis Services, you can attribute performance results to how well server properties are tuned in the context of speed and scalability requirements.

Various factors influence the ...