Microsoft Analysis Services Tutorial

Design Storage and Process the Cube in Microsoft Analysis Services

In this section, you will learn how to design storage for the data and aggregations in your cube.

Before you can use or browse the data in your cubes, you must process them.

You can choose from three storage modes: multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP), relational OLAP (ROLAP), and hybrid OLAP (HOLAP).

Analysis Services lets you to set up aggregations. Aggregations are precalculated summaries of data that greatly improve the efficiency and response time of queries. When you process a cube, the aggregations designed for the cube are calculated and the cube is loaded with the calculated aggregations and data.

In the Analysis Manager left pane, expand the Cubes folder, right-click the MySalesCube cube, and then click Design Storage.

In the Welcome step, click Next.

Select MOLAP as your data storage type, and then click Next.

• Under Set Aggregation Options, click Performance gain reaches. In the box, enter 60 to indicate the percentage.

  You are instructing Analysis Services to give a performance boost of up to 60 percent, regardless of how much disk space this requires. Administrators can use this tuning ability to balance the need for query performance against the disk space required to store aggregation data.

  

   

• Click Start. You can watch the Performance vs. Size graph in the right side of the wizard while Analysis Services designs the aggregations. Here you can see how increasing performance gain requires additional disk space utilization.
• When the process of designing aggregations is complete, you can see how much storage is needed to achieve 60% gain. If you think the space is to much, you can hit Reset button and choose a lower number for the gain. On the other hand if you think you have enough space, you can hit Reset and increate the gain and click on continue to re calculate.
• click Next and the Analysis Services will start processing the cube. In this process the aggregations are computed and stored in the cube.

• Finally close the Dialog Box and return to Main Window of the Analysis Services.
• In the next section you will learn how to browse the data in MySalesCube that you just finished creating.

Browse Data Cube >