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Load Testing Analysis Services

Bill Anton provides Powershell code to load test Analysis Services cubes:

One of the more time consuming pieces in this process is step 4 – setting up a solution that can generate a concurrent query workload. Bob Duffy (b | t) has written blogs and delivered presentations on the topic of Analysis Services load testing. However, when it comes to tooling (unless something changed recently) I believe he’s still using a custom .NET Visual Studio Test solution for the test harness. And unless you know .NET, you’re going to have a pretty difficult time getting setup… which is why I was so happy when, earlier this year, Chris Schmidt (b | t) wrote a post over on MSDN demonstrating a method for load testing an Analysis Services database using PowerShell.

This weekend I finally had some time to expand upon Chris’ code sample and add several new features… e.g. parameters (target server/database, level of concurrency, queries per batch, etc) and the ability to retrieve MDX (or DAX) queries from a SQL table. In my experience, it’s quite a bit easier to generate a table of MDX/DAX queries rather than a bunch of txt files with a query in each file.

My first thought was “Well, that doesn’t seem too complicated.”  Which means that Bill did a great job.