In this article we will show how to take typical, everyday MDX and optimize it by simply following advices of MDX Studio Analyzer. As a starting point, I will take “Product Volatility” example as published by Thomas Ivarson in his blog. It is a perfect example, because Thomas took a real business problem, and implemented it using very clean and ...

Partitions have been a built-in feature of Analysis Services ever since the first version. Naturally, all the engine subsystems, including the MDX query optimizer, work well with partitions. There are rare cases, however, when over-aggressive prefetching can generate query plan which is not optimal with respect to the partitioning scheme. ...

As the readers of my blog know, bulk evaluation mode (called ''block computation mode'' in Katmai) delivers much better performance in MDX than the cell-by-cell evaluation mode. Therefore the most important optimization technique with MDX in Analysis Services is to rewrite MDX in such a way that makes block computations possible. Easy to say, ...

I was reading the blog post ''My notes from Microsoft BI Conference'' by Vidas Matelis. It is a collection of notes recorded at different presentations, chalk talks etc. I felt that I agree with some of them, disagree with some, and have no opinion about some. I felt like it would be useful to write down my thoughts about these notes. Of ...

In this article we will discuss some of the best practices around writing efficient Analysis Services stored procedures using server ADOMD.NET. These days there is plenty of information about writing efficient MDX - in books, whitepapers, blogs, forums etc. Just recently Microsoft released two documents - Performance Guide and Design Best ...

How to get averages and other ratio based MDX calculations demonstrate great performance ? I thought I covered this subject in great depth before, but I probably wasn't concise enough. Last week I was asked to help with performance to very big and important customer (who shall remain unnamed). When I arrived on site, I found the project staff to ...

IIF is one of the most popular MDX functions, (this was proved by these surveys). Yet, it can cause significant performance degradation, which is often blamed on other parts of the system. Many times it is simple to rewrite the MDX expression to get rid of IIF altogether, and other times it is possible to slightly change the IIF to increase ...

Well, apparently I am one of the industry influencers ! At least this is what Kimball Group thinks, because they sent me their just published "The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Toolset" book by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite. According to the message, they have sent it ...