Andrew Calvett

Working with SSAS traces and the dreaded Textdata in SSMS

ACALVETT — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:06:01 GMT

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...(read more)

SSAS Crash Dump behavior

ACALVETT — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:07:19 GMT

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...(read more)

Extreme load and “the operation has been cancelled”

ACALVETT — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 22:03:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Two new Analysis Services Blogs

ACALVETT — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:12:22 GMT

Please welcome two new bloggers Pete Adshead and Christian Bracchi to the blogosphere! These guys truly know what it means to build enterprise class highly scalable Analysis Services Solutions and you now how the opportunity to read about their experiences...(read more)

SSAS 2008 R2 Operations Guide

ACALVETT — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:59:00 GMT

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...(read more)

SQL Agent and SSAS Commands

ACALVETT — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:27:00 GMT

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...(read more)

Parallelism, CPU Time & DMV’s

ACALVETT — Mon, 30 May 2011 11:04:00 GMT

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...(read more)

SSAS Exposes a W2K3 bug

ACALVETT — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 22:05:00 GMT

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...(read more)

SSAS Deployment essentials

ACALVETT — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:50:00 GMT

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...(read more)

SSAS 2008 R2– Little Gems

ACALVETT — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 23:48:00 GMT

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...(read more)