And so it begins. That time of year when other tasks get set aside and conference preparation, travel, and events consume my life. It seems particularly intense this year because I have more events than usual stacked into this season. Now that I’ve made the move to Southeast Alaska, I’m taking full advantage of each trip away from my remote Alaska wilderness location (which is challenging in and of itself) by stacking my itinerary with lots of #SQLFamily goodness! (You can always see what I’m up to next on my Upcoming Events page.)
Today for 24 Hours of Pass Fall 2012, I presented “Slow MDX Queries: The Case of the Empty Tuples” as a preview for my “Secrets of SSAS Storage” half-day session at the PASS Summit 2012 in Seattle later in the year. If you missed it, and even if you didn’t, you can download the sample files that I used in my demonstration. Note that my demonstration was set up to use the Adventure Works cube in SSAS 2012, but you can use them with any version of SSAS and any database as long as you change the applicable references.
The video recording for the session will be available in a couple of weeks, and I’ll include the link here so you can see what I did in the demo, at least the parts that worked – definitely operator error here. I had five thumbs and no fingers today for some reason! It must have been the sunshine. We’ve had day after day of rain here in Southeast Alaska for months and perhaps the sun affected me! These files should work fine for you, and if not, just let me know and I’ll get them cleaned up. And of course, if you have any questions about this topic, feel free to post your question in the comments section below.
P.S. Some good news about MDX Studio. Even though the online version is no longer available (as I discovered to my chagrin during the 24HOP session today) and the MDX Studio site for the desktop version is now down (permanently, it appears), Dan English (blog|twitter) let me know that Mosha has a public Skydrive where he posted the builds. You can download the desktop version of MDX Studio for SSAS 2005 and SSAS 2008. I’ve run it successfully with SSAS 2008 R2 also. I haven’t tried with SSAS 2012, so I’m not sure if it works there or not yet. It’s a great tool for analyzing MDX queries. Enjoy!