Cube Storage: Planning Partitions (Business Intelligence Development Studio Perspective) - Page 3

Create a New Analysis Services Project within Business Intelligence Development Studio

As most regular readers of my MSSQL Server Analysis Services column already know, the articles of this series depend heavily upon working within the Unified Dimensional Model (“UDM”), during hands-on practice sessions, as a means of employing the components of the integrated Microsoft business intelligence solution in a meaningful fashion – and in a manner such that what we learn can be extrapolated to the needs of our respective business environments. To provide an easy means of creating a relatively rich practice environment, we will “import” the design of our cloned Analysis Services database, ANSYS086_AS, into a project that we will create for that purpose within the Business Intelligence Development Studio. We will accomplish this by taking the following steps:

The equivalent on my PC appears as depicted in Illustration 10.

We briefly see a splash page that lists the components installed on the PC, and then Microsoft Visual Studio opens at the Start page.

The Connect to Database dialog appears.

The Connect to Database dialog appears, with our input, similar to that depicted in Illustration 12.

A “Reading database from the server ...” message briefly appears, as shown in Illustration 13.

Next, we see the ANSYS086_AS database, together with all its member folders and objects, appear within the Solution Explorer (which is positioned, by default, in the upper right corner of the design environment).

With a complete Analysis Services project in place, we have established development access to our sample database, containing a cube. This affords us an environment from which to perform the exercises of the following practice session, without having to build all the objects we might need from scratch.

We are now ready to access the new Analysis Services database we have created within the Business Intelligence Development Studio. Here, we are positioned to take a look at some of the options available for resource assignment and partition settings, which we will examine as a part of our discussion surrounding partition planning. Let’s open the Adventure Works cube, within the clone Analysis Services database we have created, and begin setting ourselves up for our review in the next section with the following steps:

The Cube Designer opens, defaulted to the Cube Structure tab. For purposes of this article, we will be working within the Partitions tab, where partitions can be conveniently constructed and maintained. Here we can perform settings and assignments related to storage, proactive caching, writeback, and more for each measure group within the cube, as we shall see.

The Partitions tab loads.

We are now positioned to begin our discussion of partition planning, and our examination of some of the resource assignments and settings upon which our partition planning efforts can be based.