Vidas Matelis Analysis Services Blog

With SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 Microsoft introduced storage format vardecimal. As I work a lot with big fact tables, I decided to test how this new format affects storage. If you want to get estimated impact on using vardecimal storage format, you can run stored procedure sp_estimated_rowsize_reduction_for_vardecimal. This SP expects table name as parameter and returns row count, average row length for fixed format and average row length for vardecimal format.

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I prefer to use usage statistics to generate SSAS 2005 aggregates, but during the initial phases of a project they are not available. So I usually build a set of random aggregates, and after enough usage statistics are accumulated, I rebuild aggregates based on usage. Microsoft provides a nice wizard to generate aggregates on measure groups and partitions. But because I have to do this task way to many times, I decided to build a simple SSIS package that does it for me.

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