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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 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

Parallelism, CPU Time & DMV’s
30 May 2011 12:04

Whilst reviewing the CPU statistics of a system that i knew was CPU bound i found the numbers were not adding up and i was not seeing the code i expected to see as a top CPU consumer so i decided to going digging. I quickly identified that if the query has gone parallel it: Only shows as one thread in sys.dm_exec_requests because sys. dm_exec_requests does not... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: SQL 2005, Tools, Tips, Performance, Database Engine, 2008, 2008 R2, SQL 2008, CPU, Parallelism, DMV

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 2005 – Server side tracing starter kit
07 April 2008 22:32

Analysis services 2005 (SSAS) added the ability to trace server side events and i have used this feature a number of times. To date i had always used the profiler gui to do the SSAS tracing but today i found myself needing to initiate and manage a trace with scripts. The good news is that it can be done! It did take a while to piece together how to do it though... Read More...

by ACALVETT | 2 comment(s)

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

The joy of template parameters
15 July 2007 20:23

I thought I would do a quick blog about template parameters since I have been writing allot of standard deployment scripts for our 2005 builds and have used them extensively. So what are they? Well they are place holders and you would you use them in the same places that you would probably put a variable. The key difference comes when you assign the values. With... Read More...

by ACALVETT | 1 comment(s)

Filed under: SQL 2005, SQL 2000, Tools

What is that SPID doing?
27 March 2006 17:44

This is certainly not a new topic but something that i felt was worth revisiting and reminding people about, especially because i find many people are not aware of the ability to extract the statement within a stored procedure being executed. So, prior to SQL 2000 SP3, when we want to know what code a SPID is executing we have to use DBCC INPUTBUFFER (). The... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: SQL 2000, Tools, Tips

2005 - Alter failed for server XXX
13 February 2006 18:04

Thats exactly what i thought!! What the hell does that mean? Well, for me this occured in the context of running the maintenance plan integrity check task. It had been running fine for weeks but suddenly boom every time it ran it would fail with "Alter failed for server XXX". There was no obvious reason for this error so i had to dig out profiler to see what... Read More...

by ACALVETT | with no comments

Filed under: Maintenance Plans, SQL 2005, Tools, Tips