SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Cube Development Cookbook

Partitioning strategies

Each Analysis Services measure group consists of one or more partitions. When you first create a measure group, it has a single partition; however, for large scale implementations, creating additional partitions is essential. Having multiple partitions benefits both processing as well as querying performance. Partitions can improve query performance because Analysis Services can examine multiple partitions in parallel and therefore return the requested results quicker than if it had to scan a single, very large partition. Additionally, Analysis Services can exclude the partitions which do not contain the relevant data for a particular query request, thereby shortening the total query execution time. Analysis Services can ...