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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

Extreme load and “the operation has been cancelled”
18 September 2011 23:03

There are many reasons why SSAS may generate an operation has been cancelled but i want to take you through a new, although rare, one that i recently discovered. To set the scene I had been tuning the Process Index phase on one of our servers so we could fit a full reindex of a 1.8TB cube comfortably into a maintenance slot over the weekend. I will write another... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: Tips, Performance, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008, Windows 2003, Processing, SSAS 2008, Operation, Cancelled, W2K3

SSAS 2008 R2 Operations Guide
02 June 2011 14:59

What can i say but WOO HOO! The SSAS 2008 R2 Operations Guide has been published so download your copy now! This document should be considered essential reading and contains over 100 pages of high quality information for configuring, testing and operating an Analysis Services server. Finally i consider this document so important i have made a rare exception and... Read More...

by ACALVETT | 1 comment(s)

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

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 | 1 comment(s)

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

SSAS 2008 R2– Little Gems
03 December 2010 23:48

I have spent the last few days working with SSAS 2008 R2 and noticed a few small enhancements which many people probably won’t notice but i will list them here and why they are important to me. New profiler events Commit: This is a new sub class event for “progress report end”. This represents the elapsed time taken for the server to commit your data. It is important... Read More...

by ACALVETT | 2 comment(s)

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

SSAS Native v .net Provider
30 November 2010 19:55

Recently I was investigating why a new server which is in its parallel running phase was taking significantly longer to process the daily data than the server its due to replace. The server has SQL & SSAS installed so the problem was not likely to be in the network transfer as its using shared memory. As i dug around the SQL dmv’s i noticed in sys.dm_exec_connections... Read More...

by ACALVETT | 1 comment(s)

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

SSAS <PreAllocate>: What you should know
18 July 2010 22:25

Preallocating memory for SSAS running on Windows 2003 is a good thing but as with all good things it is essential to know the behavioural changes you will experience, some of which may not be so obvious. My observations relate to SSAS 2008 SP1 CU8 running on Windows 2003 SP2. Why PreAllocate? In my opinion there are 2 reasons which i detail below. The first is... Read More...

by ACALVETT | 4 comment(s)

Filed under: Tips, Analysis Services, SSAS, 2008