We have thus practiced the basic steps of using another useful performance tuning tool, the Partition Wizard. As more data becomes available for analysis, partitions, for quarters or months could potentially be created to meet the needs of the organization in an optimal way. Those requirements, and the frequency with which they would need to be met, would dictate the best strategy for optimization through the use of partitions. Once the partitions were created, aggregations and other considerations could be designed for each, with the only limitation being mandated by the likelihood of future merges, as we suggested in our practice exercise.
Summary
In this lesson we introduced the MSAS Partition Wizard, another tool in our MSAS cube optimization toolset. As its name perhaps indicates, the Partition Wizard provides us an easy means of creating and modifying partitions within our cubes. We first discussed partitioning as a concept, within the context of MSAS cubes, and then we began a hands-on exercise where we created a partition upon a copy of the Budget sample cube. As we proceeded through the guided steps of the Wizard, we examined the options that are available to us, commenting upon general optimization concepts as a prelude to future articles wherein we will concentrate upon specific techniques.
Copyright 2004 by the author.
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