Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team

How to warm up the Analysis Services data cache using Create Cache statement?

Goal This document describes how to build Create Cache commands. Create Cache for Analysis Services (AS) was introduced in SP2 of SQL Server 2005. It can be used to make one or more queries run faster by populating the OLAP storage engine cache first. Read More...

SSAS Partition Slicing

Summary: SSAS uses partitions to contain cube data. Small cubes might use only one, but for non trivial cubes, cube designers will create partitions based on ease of managing data and to split groups of data. This document discusses how the server uses Read More...

Check out the exciting new SQL Server Best Practices website.....

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/default.mspx Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. Drawing on the extensive experience and expertise Read More...

Best SQL Server 2005 MDX Tips and Tricks - Part 1

Overview SQL Server’s 2005 Analysis Services has introduced several changes to the MDX queries syntax that can lead to better performance than the equivalent AS 2000 queries. Here is a list of tips and tricks as well as best practices on how to get better Read More...

OLTP Blueprint - A Performance Profile of OLTP applications

Performance and Tuning Blue Prints We will look at different types of applications, how they use resources, and how one would approach performance tuning each. The performance profile of OLTP differs significantly from a Relational Data Warehouse or Reporting Read More...

How can SQL Server 2005 help me evaluate and manage indexes?

SQLCAT Blog: Question: How can SQL Server 2005 help me evaluate and manage indexes? (1) How can I find out whether my indexes are useful? How are they used? (2) Do I have any tables or indexes that are not used (or rarely) (3) What is the cost of index Read More...

Partitioned Tables, Parallelism & Performance considerations

Q: When querying SS2005 Partitioned Tables, what kind of parallelism should I expect to see and how will that affect performance? A: First, a brief background on partitioning. SQL Server 2005 table partitioning provides many improvements in terms of manageability Read More...

How do you measure CPU pressure?

It is important to understand whether CPU pressure is affecting SQL Server performance. This is true even in the case where SQL Server is the only application running on a particular box. The System object Perfmon counter Processor Queue length is not Read More...