Evaluating Your Installation

How fast is fast enough?

Before getting too involved with tuning your system, you should evaluate whether any tuning is necessary. If response time is acceptable, then you can decide to leave your installation in its current configuration. On the other hand, if response time falls far below what you would consider reasonable, then tuning is mandatory.

This chapter describes several different approaches that you can take to improve the performance of your system. Some are easy while others are hard. Some cost money while others cost time. You will need to decide how fast is fast enough, and which steps you are willing to take to reach your goal.

Tuning check list

The following checklist identifies various tuning options. Look over this list periodically to make sure that you have addressed the areas most likely to degrade performance on your system:

Configure OLAP Services to use a smaller, more efficient server character set. See Chapter 5.

Dedicate a new computer with at least two processors to OLAP Services.

Optimize the data warehouse by creating indexes, materialized views and partitions, and striping the data.

Use the Performance Manager to pinpoint performance problems.