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Extreme load and the “operation has been cancelled”
There are many reasons why SSAS may generate an operation has been cancelled but i want to take you through a new, although rare, one that i recently discovered. To set the scene I had been tuning the...
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SSAS Crash Dump behavior
In SSAS 2005, when an exception occurs, you will always get a crash dump generated in the log directory of the instance and this could potentially lead to a lot of crash dumps consuming resources and a...
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Working with SSAS traces and the dreaded Textdata in SSMS
For good or bad i regularly work with SSAS traces that i have saved to a table and many years ago i was regularly frustrated by the fact that the contents of the textdata column containing the query is...
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SQL Server 2008 uses half the CPU’s
I recently got my hands on a couple of 4 socket servers with Intel E7-4870′s (10 cores per cpu) and with hyper threading enabled that gave me 80 logical CPU’s. The server has Windows 2008 R2 SP1 along...
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SSAS Multithreaded sync with Windows 2008 R2
We have been happily running some of our systems on Wndows 2003 and have had an upgrade to W2K8 R2 on the list for quite some time. The upgrade has now completed and we can start taking advantage of...
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Windows 2008 file transfer performance improvements
I have been reading about Server Message Block (SMB) 3 and thought to myself it would be good to remind people about SMB 2 as many systems have not upgraded to Windows 2008 to take advantage of it. For...
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SSAS Free drive space command
Today i was reviewing some traces and saw 2 commands i had never noticed before which had been issued by SSMS, these are shown below. SystemGetLogicalDrives SystemGetAllowedFolders The commands can be...
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SSAS Maestro and the first challenge
Its official, 2012 ended on a high for me, I received confirmation that I have passed the Microsoft SSAS Maestro certification!!! I won’t repeat the details of the what the Maestro certification is but...
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The Anatomy of a process update – Part 1
I have been working on optimising the process update of one of our multi terabyte systems and this 2 part post will break down the optimisation process and share with you some very interesting results....
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The anatomy of a process update – Part 2
In part 1 of this 2 part post I shared an overview of the procedure to optimise process update. I will now walk through the optimisation process on one of our multi terabyte systems. Part 1 shows a...
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SSAS – Out of memory exception during processing
For a while now I been analysing a situation and i have got it down to a fine art now where by I do the following Create a memory a memory intensive situation where i am using 85% of available memory...
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Targeting CHECKDB SQL Agent jobs for resource governing
Some time ago I was looking into the performance of DBCC CHECKDB on one of our servers and came to the conclusion that the best Degree of Parallelism (DOP) for CHECKDB was not the same as our server...
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Exposing the SSAS file system with the Metadata Sniffer
Very recently I encountered a production issue and to assist me in the root cause analysis I needed information/clues that are not exposed by any SSAS interfaces so I created the metadata sniffer. I...
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Automating process monitor data collection
Recently I needed to investigate why SSAS synchronisation commands were intermittently failing and the errors pointed to a file lock on a SSAS data file. To identify the file lock I needed to run...
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When is SELECT INTO not minimally logged?
If you had asked me that question a month ago i would have said “Never, it is always minimally logged and this behaviour is documented in BOL’. But now I know better… Recently i have been working on an...
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Windows 2008 file transfer performance improvements
I have been reading about Server Message Block (SMB) 3 and thought to myself it would be good to remind people about SMB 2 as many systems have not upgraded to Windows 2008 to take advantage of it. For...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SSAS Free drive space command
Today i was reviewing some traces and saw 2 commands i had never noticed before which had been issued by SSMS, these are shown below. SystemGetLogicalDrives SystemGetAllowedFolders The commands can be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
SSAS Maestro and the first challenge
Its official, 2012 ended on a high for me, I received confirmation that I have passed the Microsoft SSAS Maestro certification!!! I won’t repeat the details of the what the Maestro certification is but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Anatomy of a process update – Part 1
I have been working on optimising the process update of one of our multi terabyte systems and this 2 part post will break down the optimisation process and share with you some very interesting results....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The anatomy of a process update – Part 2
In part 1 of this 2 part post I shared an overview of the procedure to optimise process update. I will now walk through the optimisation process on one of our multi terabyte systems. Part 1 shows a...
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