SSAS: Remote Partitions

Last week I blogged about setting the partition slice in SSAS and how it can help with performance (see here). Sometimes, for scalability reasons it may be helpful to store partitions on a different server or instance where you can take advantage of additional cpu and memory in order to gain faster performance. This functionality does exist, in a feature referred to as remote partitions. Remote partitions reside on a server different from the main cube. For simpler administration, remote partitions are still managed on the instance that the parent cube is defined. One key caveat to this awesome functionality is that both servers must be running the same instance and SP level (in order to ensure compatibility). To start, you will need at least 2 instances of SSAS in multidimensional mode. Remote partitions are much easier to set up than you might think, and if you've already created partitions you've already passed the configuration screen.