When to Scale-Up or Scale-Out with Azure Analysis Services

Of all the new features and capabilities currently available with Azure Analysis Services, dynamic scaling up/down and in/out are my 2 favorite. Scaling Up refers to adding more (CPU and/or memory) resources Scaling Out refers to adding more servers Together these features allow you to adjust resources to match changes in workload with only a […]

Moving a Cube Partition Without Unprocessing It

Last week I spent some time redesigning a SSAS multidimensional cube and part of that effort involved re-partitioning the measure group by customer (instead of date) and redistributing the partitions across a new set of drives. Initial testing shows serious performance improvement (which I plan to blog about in a bit more detail in the […]

SSAS Tabular: Scale-Out Query Architecture

Earlier this week, while discussing high-concurrency architecture options for SSAS multidimensional, a colleague asked about options for SSAS tabular and mentioned there was very little information available online specific to tabular…and so, a blog post is born. The short answer is that Scale-Out Query Architecture for Tabular is essentially identical to that for multidimensional. And […]

Building an OLAP Farm in the Cloud with Azure Virtual Machines – Part 1

FYI: the features needed to implement the OLAP Farm architecture (Remote partitions, Remote linked measure groups, Linked dimensions) have been deprecated as of SQL 2014. The “OLAP Farm” is an Analysis Services architecture that makes use of remote partitions on the backend and linked dimensions and measure groups on the front end in order to […]

SSAS Memory Configurations for Common Architectures

Earlier this week I was working with a client to configure the server-level memory configuration properties for one of their SSAS servers and the discussion drummed up enough thoughts to prompt this blog post. Below are the primary SSAS server-level memory configuration properties (along with the descriptions from TechNet BoL) that we will focus on […]

Steering the Car Back on the Road

In my last post (Go Work for a Consulting Firm), I discussed a difficult situation faced earlier in my career…back when I lacked the knowledge and expertise to solve the problems facing the team and ultimately steer the car back on the road.  Towards the end of that post I mentioned how, after working for […]