Category: Analysis Services

Chris Webb digs into MDX query serialization.

Part 1:

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.

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Bill Anton digs into the SSAS Flight Recorder:

During a recent engagement involving an Analysis Services health assessment, one of the things I noted was that the Flight Recorder was enabled. During the post-assessment review with the client, where we walked through the report and recommendations, I quickly explained what the Flight Recorder was, why it should be disabled (answer: never used, wasted resources, etc), and that disabling it would not produce a noticeable performance gain – the recommendation was mostly out of habit.

Bill’s answer is to build custom performance monitoring.

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Bill Anton has more information on performance monitoring for Analysis Services:

For query workloads, we can see important information about every single query that hits the system including details such as the total duration of the query, query text (MDX/DAX), start and end times, as well as the associated user account. We can also determine details as to how the query was executed such as the number of partitions scanned, aggregation hits/misses, cache hits/misses, other queries running at the same time, etc…all of which have an effect on the performance of any one particular query. A secondary benefit is that we’ll be able to identify the usage pattern(s) of folks using the cube. For example, is usage low/moderate throughout the week with a heavy spike on Friday mornings?

Bonus note:  it looks like there will be an xEvents for Analysis Services GUI in SQL Server 2016.

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