Supplement Your Microsoft Business Intelligence Strategy with the Fast Performance and Excellent ROI of Personal Data Marts
OLAP should be fast!
OLAP is at its best when browsing results are typically returned in less than one second, and very rarely in more than five seconds.
Fast cubes make for happy users. If there are happy users, there will be more users. And with fast cubes, each of those users will be able to find more insights to improve the organization.
Here are some quotes, supporting the need to be concerned about OLAP performance:
From Nigel Pendse, The OLAP Report:
Slow query performance has been consistently the most serious product-related reported problem, and for the last few years it has been the single most often complained of problem.From Elizabeth Vitt, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Performance Guide:
Query performance directly impacts the quality of the end user experience. As such, it is the primary benchmark used to evaluate the success of an OLAP implementation.From Gabhan Berry, Build Better Cubes: Real-Life Advice on Building Analysis Services Cubes:
Every business intelligence solution will have its problems with data scalability. It’s inevitable. Almost always, the source data will increase in size over time. What you have today may perform adequately but this may not be true next month or next year. As technology and hardware has improved, this problem has been alleviated but not solved; the limits have simply been moved, not extinguished. Building a cube that uses all data for all time, and where the data increases over time, is a recipe for a cube that will eventually be too slow to use.Read this paper online in HTML format.