10 Things All BI Administrators Should Know Robert L Davis

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10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  10 – SQL components don’t play well together  Database Engine, Analysis Services, and SSIS Packages are resource hogs  Each one will try to use as many resources as it can  They don’t care what the other needs  Recommendation: separate components to different servers

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  9 – File placement still matters  Separate files to different drives for best performance  BackupDir  DataDir  LogDir  TempDir

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  8 – Backup the encryption keys  SSRS stores data encrypted in ReportServer database  Data source accounts and passwords  Report subscriptions  Key can be recreated but encrypted data will be lost  Import to other SSRS instances to create a farm

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  7 – Warm the cache in SSAS  Run a pre-defined set of queries  Use the WITH CACHE statement to pre-load a commonly used slice of a cube WITH CACHE AS '([Sales Territory].[Sales Territory Region].Members)' SELECT {[Sales Territory].[Sales Territory Region].Members} ON COLUMNS, {[Measures].[Order Count]} ON ROWS FROM [Adventure Works];

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  6 – More RAM > large paging file > out of memory errors  SSAS uses RAM if it can  If available RAM is low, SSAS will use the paging file  If out of RAM and paging file space, out of memory errors may occur

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  5 – Tune parallelism for high CPU servers  ThreadPool\Query\Maxthreads <= 2 X CPU count  Controls maximum concurrency  ThreadPool\Process\MaxThreads <= 10 X CPU count  Controls maximum parallel threads per process  Logical CPUs

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  4 – Use partitioned views  Older, static data in partitioned table  Newer, changing data in stand-alone table  Combine with a partitioned view

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  3 – Load balancing SSAS > Clustering  Hardware or Software load balancing  Allows you to process cubes one at a time programmatically  Scalable to many servers

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  2 – Don’t give SSRS users database access  Used stored credentials of a non-user domain service account

10 Things All BI Admins Should Know  1 – Back up your databases  SSAS databases should be backed up too  Use SSMS to create backup script in XMLA  Schedule via a SQL job Adventure Works DW 2008R2 E:\MSSQL\OLAP\BAK\Adventure Works DW 2008R2.abf true

10 Things All BI Administrators Should Know Q&A

10 Things All BI Administrators Should Know Thank You! The PowerPoint slide-deck and recording of the session will be available on my website later today.