Hello,
What is maximum size of a cube in MOLAP storage mode?

I have an existing Analysis services application that is creating cubes
in MOLAP storage. How can I define storage location of this cube? And
if size of this cube becomes bigger than available space on a disk, can
I assign additional storage on any alternate disk?

If you have SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition you can use partitions to
split a cube to separate physical disks.Look in BOL.

I have never heard of a file size limit. More important is the number of
dimensions, levels in each dimension and the number of members in each level
and, finally, the aggregation percentage of the whole cube. AS2000 only
supports 2 GB of physical memory(that you can increase to 3 GB) on 32-bit
machines.

Regards
Thomas Ivarsson



<goyald (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Aggreing with Thomas - it's never the disk size - but when creating
aggregations you should never choose 100% - a general rule is 20 - 30 % and
then
focus on adding aggregations where it's needed or changing dimension
structures into hierachies as much as possible.

There is a microsoft article regarding performance out there - I can find
the link if you don't already have it....

<goyald (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

There is no maximum size of the a cube. Using partitioning heavily we have
built production databases well over a terabyte.

Ref: location of files
A restriction with SQL Server 2000 is that all files must sit under a single
folder (what we call the data folder). There is no limit to the disk storage
under there, but it must be under that single folder. You are free to use
RAID, SAN or whatever technology you want under the covers so long as it
fits on a single folder.

With SQL Server 2005 this restriction is lifted. With Yukon you will be able
to store partition storage files on different volumes, different folders,
whatever. Storage is allocated on a partition by partition basis.

Hope that helps.
--
Dave Wickert [MSFT]
dwickert (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com
Program Manager
BI SystemsTeam
SQL BI Product Unit (Analysis Services)
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

<goyald (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

Dave,
Thanks. You stated that "A restriction with SQL Server 2000 is that all
files must sit under a single folder (what we call the data folder).
There is no limit to the disk storage under there, but it must be under
that single folder."

Is it possible for a single folder on Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 to
span multiple volumes?

That is more of a Windows question that others could better assist than I.
There are many techniques. Anything that makes multiple volumes look like
one will work with Analysis Services. I've used RAID 5 in the past and
others. Which one is best for you is more of an infrastruture question,
probably better asked on one of their newsgroups than here. There are
tradeoffs for the various techniques.

On my current project we have over 15TB and we are using EMC SAN mount
points under Win2K3 SP1. And then using various techniques under each of the
physical drives. It is working well.

Like I said, on our mid-range servers, we are using RAID5 stripsets across
10 146GB 10K drives, giving us well over a TB of disk folder space.

Notice, however, that all of these techniques create local drives. Analysis
Services can work against any of the storage technologies which look like
local drives to the OS.

HOWEVER, don't use network drives. Don't go out and get big disk drives on
old-style NAS network appliances (which look like network files shares to
the OS). We optimize heavily on the OS disk caching which you get with
locally connected disk drives. The network share algorithms are not
optimized for the way we do I/O. Most folks that I've talked to (and it was
my experience on an earlier project about 2 years ago) reported terrible I/O
performance when data folders were placed on network file shares.

Hope that helps.
--
Dave Wickert [MSFT]
dwickert (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com
Program Manager
BI SystemsTeam
SQL BI Product Unit (Analysis Services)
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

<goyald (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote