Excel Against a SSAS Cube Slow: Performance Improvement Tips

Applies to SSAS 2008 and Excel 2007.

As you add columns from a SSAS cube to pivot table in Excel it will progressively get slower to the point that it is virtually unresponsive. In order to understand exactly why this occurs we need to look at how Excel builds its MDX. Let's take a look at a simple pivot table against AdventureWorks.