Database Compression Effects on SSAS Processing

Just recently I was optimising the processing time for a rather large cube on my laptop. The hardware I used was not tremendously powerful (a mobile i5 CPU, 8Gb RAM and one 7200 RPM hard disk) and having a 500M rows fact table proved to be somewhat of a challenge for it.

The set up was fairly typical - a large fact table, with a few dimensions in a typical start schema. The goal was to get it to process as fast as possible.