After a few recent conversations with CIO and CTO types, I was amazed that there is still the concept out there that SQL Server doesn’t scale well.  So I sat down to write a lengthy blog to dispel that rumor.  After doing some research, I found that there is so much already written and available on the web that I decided to gather all ...

The database system in a company that is growing internationally must support multilingual characters in tables with Unicode data types. Existing databases that support only non-Unicode information must be migrated from non-Unicode data type to Unicode data type. This paper summarizes best practices for migrating database systems from non-Unicode ...

Many-to-many dimension relationships in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) enable you to easily model complex source schemas and provide great analytical capabilities. This capability frequently comes with a substantial cost in query performance due to the runtime join required by Analysis Services to resolve many-to-many queries. This best ...

Default SSAS behavior can sometimes result in small queries being slowed down by concurrently running big queries. Recently in working with a customer, we observed the most common queries when run by themselves took about 1 second and some ad-hoc queries against their 110 GB cube took about 3 minutes.  When running both together, small query ...

As noted within the Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide, there are some niche situations where setting the Processing Group property to ByTable provides more optimal processing than the default value of ByAttribute. In a customer scenario, we had discovered that they had two dimensions (each of which has >25 million members and 8-10 ...

Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Using SAN Snapshots

Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services There are a variety of things that you can do to improve the performance of an individual MDX query. To begin, you must identify the source(s) of the performance bottlenecks in the execution of a poorly performing MDX query. To identify the source(s) ...

Tom Davidson wrote: I've been working with database applications for the last 25 years. A particular area of interest for me is SQL Server performance. As part of the Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT) for the last 7 years, I've had an opportunity to observe what works (and more importantly what doesn't !) in the ...

Author: Bren Newman Introduction When using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Transactional Replication, the Log Reader Agent reads the log, constructs SQL statements for published articles and posts it to the Distribution database; the Distribution Agent reads the Distribution database, delivers and applies the ''package'' to the Subscriber. Often the ...

Summary: SSAS uses partitions to contain cube data.  Small cubes might use only one, but for non trivial cubes, cube designers will create partitions based on ease of managing data and to split groups of data.  This document discusses how the server uses ''slices'' to examine partitions at query time.  The ...