Chris Webb digs into MDX query serialization.
The Serialize Results Begin event marks the point where SSAS starts to construct the cellset returned. The Serialize Results Current events that immediately follow it, with EventSubclass “1 – Serialize Axes” show SSAS serialising the tuples that are present on the Columns axis (listed as Axis 0 in the TextData column), the Rows axis (Axis 1) and the Where clause (Slicer Axis). The numeric values in the ProgressTotal column for the Serialize Results Current events shows the number of tuples on each axis: the two tuples on columns are the two measures, the six tuples on rows are the six years, and there’s one tuple on the slicer. After that SSAS gets the data for each of the cell values (as shown by the Query Subcube Verbose event – note that this query is running on a warm cache) and there is then a Serialize Results Current event with EventSubclass “2 – Serialize Cells”; the ProgressTotal column shows that twelve cells (2 columns * 6 rows) in total were returned. The Serialize Results End event shows that SSAS has finished constructing the cellset and not surprisingly it’s followed immediately by the Query Cube End and Query End events.
Part 2:
There are a couple of interesting things to note about this query. First, SQL Server Management Studio on my laptop says that it takes nine seconds to run, even on a warm cache; the Duration column for the Query End event in Profiler, however, shows a value of around six seconds. The three second difference must be the time it takes for SSAS to return the cellset to SQL Server Management Studio, and for SQL Server Management Studio to render the results (my guess is that it’s the second operation that takes the majority of this time – other client tools may be more efficient at rendering large resultsets).
I have so little experience with MDX that this is a wide world of amazement to me. So it’s very nice that Chris is digging into this and peeling away some of the mystery.