Currency Conversion

Boyan Penev writes in his Blog about Currency Conversion in SSAS. He provides a lot of interesting links and includes also practical examples. His Blog is absolutly worth reading (and is now included into the link section of this page).

Cube documentation with DMV data

The FrogBlog shows how to generate a SSRS documentation for a cube by using DMVs via LinkedServer access:

• http://www.purplefrogsystems.com/blog/index.php/2010/09/olap-cube-documentation-in-ssrs-part-1/
• http://www.purplefrogsystems.com/blog/index.php/2010/09/olap-cube-documentation-in-ssrs-part-2/
• http://www.purplefrogsystems.com/blog/2010/09/olap-cube-documentation-in-ssrs-part-3/ 

Linked Cubes

Again only a link ...
Chris Webb wrote in his Blog about the question:

whether, if you have multiple fact tables, you should create one big cube with multiple measure groups or multiple cubes each with a single measure group.

Wenn he says that "Linked measure groups are a pain to manage" I have to agree...

Dynamic Sets with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Excel 2010

Thomas Ivarsson shows in his Blog that the use of dynamic sets is much improved for the combination of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Excel 2010.

Partitioning

Teo Lachev writes in his Blog about the rules for the definition of partitions. For him partitioning is mainly a feature to improve the manageability of cubes and not to improve query performance - and I guess he's right.

Process Update

In his Blog Chris Webb has published a short explanation of the consequences of ProcessUpdate on a dimension for the aggregations on related partitions. To make it even shorter: It seems to be a good idea to do a ProcessIndex on those partitions after the ProcessUpdate for the dimension.

I/O Performance

Theo Lachev explains in his Blog why the SQL Profiler does not tell you the truth about I/O waits in SSAS: it's "because the Started/Finished reading data from the partition events include also the time spent in aggregating data and this time may be significant". He suggests to use the Xperf tool from the Windows Performance Toolkit instead and provides links to some short introductions that show how to use the tool.

Apart from this he also suggests to use solid state disks (SSD) when the storage engines spends a lot of time reading data (but "There needs no Ghost, my lord, come from the grave/To tell us this.")