An Introduction to SSAS Performance and SQL Sentry Performance Advisor for Analysis Services
Over the past couple years, since SQL Sentry introduced Performance Advisor for Analysis Services, I’ve heard many people say they see SSAS as a “black box” on their servers with no real visibility into troubleshooting performance issues. Performance Advisor (PA) lifts the shroud from Analysis Services, but for some it may not be obvious how to interpret all the information gained from this new visibility.
There are many resources out there that cover OLAP architecture and MDX, but much less in the way of an explanation to all the various metrics that are available and how they correlate with each other. In response, I developed a presentation I’ve given several times now at SQL Saturdays that I believe serves to “bridge the gap” for DBA’s that may be new to SSAS, or possibly even developers who lack a dedicated administrator and need to be able to tell where the bottleneck might be on their SSAS server. I was also privileged to be invited to an interview on RunAs Radio where I spent some time discussing this with Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes.
Tags: tool, performance