Slow metadata
There’s an interesting thread on the Analysis Services MSDN Forum that I’ve been following for a while now (it’s over 40 posts long at the time of writing) that gives a good explanation of why metadata access on very large or complex cubes can be so painfully slow. Here’s the link:
In summary, it turns out that the more files there are on disk in your SSAS database folder, the slower metadata reads become, and when you reach very large numbers of files almost any kind of metadata access becomes incredibly slow. There are a lot of different factors determining how many files are created for your SSAS database but large numbers of cubes, attributes, partitions and aggregations (which end up being multiplied across each partition) are the main culprits; the problem is that the way the EstimatedSize property on metadata objects has been implemented results in SSAS having to iterate over all the files in every subdirectory in the database’s directory in the data folder to find their size.
One workaround is to set the Storage Location property of your partitions to somewhere outside the data directory since this means they won’t get scanned, but doing this makes backup and restore difficult and means you get inaccurate size estimates. The only other option is to reduce the number of partitions and aggregations you have; given that the SQLCat team are now saying that partitions of 50-60 million rows each are feasible in 2008, and that you can use different partition designs for partitions containing old and new data, there’s probably a lot of scope for doing this in most cubes. Hopefully, though, this problem will be fixed in a future release…
