SSAS Cube Processing Optimization

Sometimes there is not enough time to process you cubes. You will have to optimize processing. You can do many things.

• Try to separate different processes - break everything into smaller processing tasks. Then you will be able to tackle them individually. It will also allow you to more precisely orchestrate which task are you doing when.
• Separate processing of individual cubes.
• Instead of doing full processing of cube, do processing of data and processing of indexes (cube indexes and aggregations) separately. The first operation will involve you relational source, but the second one will use just SSAS. While SSAS server is busy you can do something else with relational engine/server.
• Try to manually set number of parallel tasks for cube processing. You may have better results. Note that you are not limited to numbers in the drop down list. You can type in other numbers.

Cost of Virtualization in SQL Server 2008 R2

In current version of SQL Server you can have have as many virtual instances of SQL Server as you want. Unfortunately, that is going to be changed in May when R2 is going to be shipped. Only Data Center Edition ($60K per socket) will be unlimited.

Tip: Therefore, if you plan to set virtual servers, buy license before May 2010. Get also Software Assurance license if you want new features that are coming in R2.

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SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services

R2 brings new Reporting Services features:

• New Report Builder 3.0
• Maps
• Report components
• Improvements in server mode

Maps

• Product sales by shelf space
• Integration with Bing Maps

Report Components

• Parts of reports can be extracted as components and reused in other reports (i.e. datasets and reports items)
• Users are notified when components are updated and can choose to download them

Shared Datasets

• Share queries between reports
• Saved in .rds files; deployed on report server
• Pass parameters to it
• Add filters and calculations
• Can be cashed

Maybe you thought that only new feature of SQL Server 2008 R2 is Power Pivot, but this is another good reason to upgrade your current version of SQL Server.