Analysis Services Query Analyzer

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

Last week a new, free tool for analysing the performance of MDX queries on SSAS Multidimensional was released: Analysis Services Query Analyzer. You can get all the details and download it here:

https://ssasqueryanalyzer.github.io/

…and here’s a post on LinkedIn by one of the authors, Francesco De Chirico, explaining why he decided to build it:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/asqa-10-released-francesco-de-chirico/

I’ve played around with it a bit and I’m very impressed – it’s a really sophisticated and powerful tool, and one I’m going to spend some time learning because I’m sure it will be very useful to me. It’s an AddIn for SQL Server Management Studio and captures Profiler and Perfmon data for an MDX query when you run it, does so for a cold and warm cache, and then displays the results in a variety of graphs and charts. And it even has an MDX formatter built in!

You can find a full list of features here, and when you download the tool it comes with very detailed documentation. Definitely a must-have for all serious SSAS Multidimensional developers.

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/ .