Update: SAN Presentation Cancelled.

Analysis Services Dimension Creation Best Practices

June 16, 2009
3:00 PM - 5:15 PM

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Analysis Services Dimension Creation Best Practices

Speaker: Brian Larson, Superior Consulting Services

Having dimensions that are well structured and function efficiently is key to having performant cubes and an important factor when encouraging users to use cubes for ad hoc reporting and interactive analysis. This session will look at best practices to observe when designing and creating dimensions in Analysis Services.

Brian Larson has 24 years of experience in the computer industry and 20 years’ experience as a consultant creating custom database applications. He is the Chief of Technology and BI Practice Manager for Superior Consulting Services in Burnsville, Minnesota, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Brian is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA).

Brian served as a member of the original Reporting Services development team as a consultant to Microsoft. In that role, he contributed to the original code base of Reporting Services. Brian has presented at national conferences and events, including the SQL Server Magazine Connections Conference, the PASS Community Summit, and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, and has provided training and mentoring on Reporting Services and business intelligence across the country. He has been a contributor and columnist for SQL Server Magazine. Brian is the author of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services and Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2008, both from McGraw-Hill Professional.

Speaker: James Lorenzen, Xiotech Corporation

1. Introduction
2. A brief history of Hard Drives
   • How Moore’s Law applies
   • The performance impact of large disks (Greater than 1 terabyte)
   • Why bigger is not always better
3. Storage topology – DAS, NAS, and SAN
   • Definitions
   • Where they fit in a data center
4. Type of disks and interfaces available today
   • More acronyms
     • SATA, SCSI, IDE, SSD, etc.
5. Where the different disks fit, performance and capacity
6. RAID Definitions
   • Why it came about
   • RAID Levels (0 through 50, or so)
7. How SQL Server uses the storage
   • The SQL Server file types
   • The performance requirements of the different file types
8. Questions

James Lorenzen is a Technical Marketing Engineer at Xiotech Corporation. He is Xiotech’s database specialist with over 25 years of database experience, fifteen years of that working with relational databases, SQL Server and Oracle. At Xiotech, James has focused on how to configure the database storage on a SAN to achieve the best possible performance from the SQL Server database. Prior to joining Xiotech, James has worked as a DBA for various companies both as consultant and dedicated Database Administration Manager. James has presented at user group meetings, covering database configuration on SAN storage. He can be reached at James_Lorenzen@Xiotech.com.