Sunday, May 21, 2006 - Posts

MDX quality improvement in Excel 2007

I just had to profile MDX queries sent to SSAS from some client. Office Web Components (that are used in the cube browser of Management Studio) in many circumstances send a lot of MDX queries, increasing roundtrip between client and server, resulting in bad performance in tables with hundreds of rows (crossjoin between 3 attributes on rows and one measure on column).

I was very worried, until I saw the clean and beautiful MDX query that Excel 2007 send to Analysis Services 2005 to get the same results: great performance, a hand-written MDX query has the same performance (WARNING: this is not a benchmark but a small test on a very limited set of queries).

This week the Beta 2 of Excel 2007 could help me to make some customer happy...

Solved trouble with SP1 setup

If you have trouble installing SQL Server 2005 SP1 and you found in the log that views sys.dm_exec_query_resource_semaphores and sys.dm_exec_query_memory_grants are missing, then you have to move the Resource database into the same path of master database.

Details are explained in KB918695; I also suggest to read this thread in MSDN Forum.