Compression with SSAS 2005 using ADOMD.Net

Introduction

I started investigating the subject of compression in Analysis Services 2005 a couple of weeks ago. My customer had written an application using ADOMD.Net 9 and was asking if compression was indeed in effect, as there seemed to be quite a high volume of traffic on the network.

I therefore decided to investigate. This post is as much a reminder for me of the various steps I took as it is a discovering guide for anyone interested in SSAS compression.

This post is fairly long as it takes you trough my journey in SSAS packet analysis. If you're only interested in the conclusion, then, bearing any misconception on my part, it seems that xml compresssion does indeed work with ADOMD.Net 9.0, but not SX encoding, a.k.a. "Binary XML".

I'd be of course very interested in other people' ideas on this subject.

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