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Working with SSAS traces and the dreaded Textdata in SSMS
04 February 2012 22:06

For good or bad i regularly work with SSAS traces that i have saved to a table and many years ago i was regularly frustrated by the fact that the contents of the textdata column containing the query is always truncated at 65535 characters. You may think 65535 characters should cover most queries but once Excel gets to work it generates some huge queries! Fortunately... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: Tools, Tips, SSMS, SSAS 2005, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008, SSAS 2008 R2, 2008 R2, SSAS 2008, Trouble Shooting, Profiling

SSAS Crash Dump behavior
17 January 2012 22:07

In SSAS 2005, when an exception occurs, you will always get a crash dump generated in the log directory of the instance and this could potentially lead to a lot of crash dumps consuming resources and a lot of work for the person who has to analyse the contents of each dump. One of the benefits of this approach is that if a user reported a serious error a quick... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: Tips, SSAS 2005, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008, SSAS 2008 R2, 2008 R2, SSAS 2008, Trouble Shooting

SQL Agent and SSAS Commands
30 May 2011 15:27

SQL Agent can be used to execute SSAS commands such as processing of a dimension and i can see that it is useful when you want to quickly schedule an adhoc processing task but there is a major drawback you need to be aware of. You are not able to specify the database to connect to and whilst you may think that it does not matter because the database is specified... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: Tips, SSAS 2005, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008, Locking, SSAS 2008 R2, 2008 R2, Blocking, Default Database, Processing, SQL Agent

SSAS Exposes a W2K3 bug
06 April 2011 23:05

I recently came across a bug in Windows 2003 SP2 which causes a blue screen of death and SSAS was exposing the bug. In my scenario SSAS was the match, a file system cache function was the fuse and a BSOD the payload….. If your an all Windows 2008 shop then there is no need to read on and i am envious One of the configurations i always set on a SSAS server is... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: Tips, SSAS 2005, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008, SSAS 2008 R2, 2008 R2, SQL, Stability, Windows 2003, FileSystemCache

SSAS Deployment essentials
30 March 2011 00:50

Over the recent years i have enjoyed the privilege of working on a number of different SSAS deployments. Some are huge, some are complex and some of them are huge and complex and most interestingly they all behave differently. What i want to share today is what i consider to be essential for an SSAS installation. This covers what i expect to see installed to... Read More...

by ACALVETT | 2 comment(s)

Filed under: Tools, Tips, Performance, SSAS 2005, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008, SSAS 2008 R2, 2008 R2

SSAS 2008 - INI Files and in place upgrades
24 September 2009 22:13

Being the suspicious person i am i wondered if there would be any differences in the MSMDSRV.ini of an instance upgraded from 2005 as opposed to a clean install. Now obviously i expect an in place upgrade to preserve my settings and add any new ones because it should not overwrite anything since i might have change from defaults for a good reason……. Below is... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: Tips, SSAS 2005, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008