To Use SSAS or not -- Measuring Perfmon Data

  • Hi all,

    I'm a DBA by trade and not very in-tune with SSAS. I did a simple cube last night to show a quarter-by-quarter count of the number of SQL installs my team has done for the past 5 years.

    The next thing I'd like to do is try to build up a cube for some of our mission critical applications that brings together all of the perfmon data that we collect for our systems.

    In the end, I'd like to have something that shows:

    CPU History

    Q1 Q2 Q3

    Server1 10% 15% 15%

    We could also do the same thing in SSRS with all T-SQL and grouping functions, so I'm trying to evaluate what options or benefits I'd see by using SSAS compared to building summary tables and querying that table in an SSRS report.

    I'd very much like to hear the comments about how DBA's make SSAS work for them.

    Regards,

    Steve

  • No comments on this one?

  • you could do this with SSAS, one of the big advantages of using a cube is that you can have a time dimension so that you mdx can be 'time' aware.

    However whether you need a cube or not really depends on your reporting requirements and the amount of data you have.

    for a simple report like you have outline i would stick to ssrs. Unless you have a large amount of data.

  • Ok thanks for the reply. I didn't think I'd gain much, but wanted to see what people who use SSAS had to say about it. Seems like I would still have needed to build a reporting using an MDX query to get at the processed data anyway.

    Regards,

    Steve

  • Though MDX will give you better flexibility rather than implementing multiple joins using the T-SQL.

    Raunak J

  • I think your idea has a lot of merit. I'm actually also planning to do something similar, if for no other reason than to get a feel of doing things as an SSAS developer and learn how to build cubes from scratch.

    I feel that, having gone through all the motions of creating and implementing an SSAS solution will better equip me to support SSAS applications in the future.

    Up to now I have been doing only high-level admin work of SSAS databases, and, being a DBA, it seems creating a cube from performance data, then report on it, is the most natural thing to do.

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