Subselects And Formula Engine Caching In SSAS 2012

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

One of the many interesting things that caught my eye in the new SSAS Tabular Performance Tuning white paper is actually about new functionality in the SSAS 2012 Multidimensional and nothing to do with Tabular! It turns out that in the DAXMD release of SSAS 2012, ie SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU4, some work was done to enable the Formula Engine to cache the results of MDX calculations for longer than the lifetime of a query when a query includes a subselect. Here's an excerpt from the paper:

Certain types of queries cannot benefit from MDX caching. For example, multi-select filters (represented in the MDX query with a subselect) prevent use of the global MDX formula engine cache. However, this limitation was lifted for most subselect scenarios as part of SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU4 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2833645/en-us). However, subselect global scope caching is still prevented for arbitrary shapes (http://blog.kejser.org/2006/11/16/arbitrary-shapes-in-as-2005/), transient calculations like NOW(), and queries without a dimension on rows or columns. If the business requirements for the report do not require visual totals and caching is not occurring for your query, consider changing the query to use a set in the WHERE clause instead of a subselect as this enables better caching in some scenarios.

This is a subject I've blogged about in the past, both for SSRS reports (which almost always use subselects in the MDX created by the query editor) and Excel PivotTables (which sometimes, but not always, use subselects) and you may want to read this posts to get some background. In my experience, if you have a lot of complex MDX calculations on your cube (financial applications are a great example), this issue can have a major impact on your overall query performance, even if it isn't immediately obvious that this is the case. On builds of SSAS before 2012 SP1 CU4, even if Storage Engine caching is working properly, if a query references a lot of MDX calculations and includes a subselect it will be consistently slow however many times you run it because the calculations will need to be re-evaluated every time the query is run.

I've heard of a few problems with CU4 regarding SSRS so I don't recommend upgrading your production SSAS servers just yet, but when these problems have been ironed out in the next full service pack I think this could be a compelling reason for many people to move to SSAS 2012. There's also still a limitation whereby queries that return a single cell value and use a subselect may still not be able to use the global Formula Engine cache, but hopefully this will be dealt with in a future release too. Overall, though, I'm extremely pleased to see yet another improvement to the Multidimensional engine.

Thanks to Jeffrey Wang for answering my questions about this functionality.

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/ .