If I Could Have New Features In SSAS Multidimensional, What Would They Be?

Reposted from Chris Webb's blog with the author's permission.

Indulge me for a moment, please. Let's imagine that somewhere in Microsoft, someone is planning for SQL Server v.next and is considering investing in new features for SSAS Multidimensional (don't laugh - I wouldn't be writing this post if I didn't think it was a possibility). What features should they be?

Before I answer that question, it's worth pointing out that despite what you might think there has been some investment in SSAS Multidimensional over the last few years. This post lists what was new in SSAS 2012 Multidimensional; since then support for DAX queries has been added and, umm, the new Divide() function. This must have been a lot of work for someone - but why does it get overlooked? One reason: none of these changes have made much difference to the ordinary SSAS Multidimensional developer's life. DAX query support is great if you're one of the few people that uses the SharePoint version of Power View; shockingly, it still doesn't work in Excel 2013 Power View yet (though I guess it will be the way the new Power BI connects to on-prem Multidimensional). NUMA support is great if you work for an investment bank and have vast amounts of data and a high-spec server, but that's only about 0.1% of the installed base.

So from this we can learn that the main consideration when choosing new features to implement should be that they should be relevant to the majority of SSAS Multidimensional developers, otherwise they'll be ignored and MS may as well have not bothered doing anything. To that we can add these other considerations:

• These features should provide compelling reasons to upgrade from earlier versions of SSAS to the new version
• While some features should be available in all editions, there should also be some features that encourage customers to upgrade from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition
• There are a limited resources (time and developers) available and Power Pivot/SSAS Tabular will be the priority, so only a few features can be delivered.
• Features that are only there to support Power BI don't count

With all of that borne in mind, here's what I would choose to implement based on what I see as a consultant and from the popularity of particular topics on my blog.

Last-Ever Non Empty

One of the most popular posts I've ever written - by a gigantic margin - is this one on the last-ever non-empty problem. Given that so many people seem to come up against this, and that the MDX solution is complex and still doesn't perform brilliantly, I think it should be built into the engine as a new semi-additive aggregation type. Since semi-additive measures are Enterprise Edition only, this would be my sole Enterprise Edition feature.

MDX Calculation Parallelism

Ever since I've been working with SSAS, people have always asked why the Formula Engine has been single-threaded. I understand why the SSAS dev team have ignored this question and instead concentrated on tuning specific scenarios: doing parallelism properly would be extremely difficult given the way MDX calculations can be layered over each other, and in plenty of cases it could lead to worse performance, not better. However I'm not asking for a 'proper' implementation of parallelism. I just want something dumb: a boolean property that you can set on a calculation that tells the Formula Engine to do this calculation on a separate thread. If it makes performance better then great; if not, then don't set it. My guess is that even a crude implementation like this could make a gigantic difference to performance on many calculation-heavy cubes.

Drillthrough

Drillthrough is one of those features that almost everyone wants to use, but for some reason has been left in a semi-broken state ever since 2005. Here's what needs to change:

• It should work with calculated members. I don't expect SSAS to understand magically how to work out which rows to display for any given MDX calculation, but I would like a way of specifying in MDX what those rows should be.
• Those stupid, ugly column names - SSDT should let us specify readable column names and let us have complete control over the order they appear in.
• Excel should allow drillthrough on multiselect filters.

'Between' Relationships

This might seem a bit of a strange choice, and I suspect it may not be easy to implement, but another problem that I come across a lot in my consultancy is the 'events-in-progress' problem. I've blogged about solving it in MDX and DAX, as have many others. I would love to see a new 'between' dimension/measure group relationship type to solve this. In fact, competing OLAP vendor iccube already implemented this and you can see how it works on that platform here and here. My feeling is that this would open up a massive number of modelling opportunities, almost as many as many-to-many relationships.

And that's it, four features that I think could make SSAS Multidimensional v.next a must-have upgrade. I'm not so naive to believe that any or all of these will be implemented, or even that we'll get any new features at all, but who knows? If you have any other suggestions, please leave a comment.

Chris has been working with Microsoft BI tools since he started using beta 3 of OLAP Services back in the late 90s. Since then he has worked with Analysis Services in a number of roles (including three years spent with Microsoft Consulting Services) and he is now an independent consultant specialising in complex MDX, Analysis Services cube design and Analysis Services query performance problems. His company website can be found at http://www.crossjoin.co.uk and his blog can be found at http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/ .