Programming Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008

Partitions, Storage Settings, and Proactive Caching

Cubes are great, and having all that BI data in one place is convenient, but sometimes parts of your cube will have different demands placed on them than other parts. Analysis Services partitions allow you to slice your cube physically and use specific storage and aggregation settings that are appropriate to each subset of your cube’s data and the unique demands placed on it.

For example, if users rarely need data older than a certain date, you might store that data on a slower (cheaper) disk, process it much less frequently, and perhaps precalculate many fewer aggregations for it than you would for recent data. Likewise, since only extremely recent data typically needs to be reprocessed, putting ...