SSAS Multidimensional HOLAP Storage: Even More Useless Than You Might Think

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

In almost 20 years of using Analysis Services I have never, ever used HOLAP storage. However the other week I was with a customer that was using ROLAP storage on top of Exasol and while query performance was generally good, I wondered whether building an aggregation or two in SSAS might help query performance in some cases. Surely HOLAP could be useful here? Sadly not.

What I hadn’t realised was that when you use HOLAP storage and process a partition, SSAS generates exactly the same fact table-level SQL query that is used to process a MOLAP partition. It then uses this data to build any aggregations you have defined and after that throws the data it has read away, leaving only the aggregations stored in MOLAP mode. Therefore you get exactly the same, slow processing performance as pure MOLAP storage and worse query performance! It even executes the SQL query when there are no aggregations defined. I had assumed SSAS would generate one SQL query for each aggregation and get just the summarised data needed by the aggregation but I was wrong. This means that for the kind of scenarios where ROLAP on a fast relational database is becoming more popular (for example when working with large data volumes and/or real-time data) HOLAP is not a viable option.

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/ .