Some competitors say that Microsoft cubes don scale. Is that true?
A. Analysis Services provides the following options to improve scalability: • Customized Aggregation Options—By using the Storage Design Wizard, you can optimize the tradeoff between system performance and the disk space allocated to store aggregations. Analysis Services uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine the optimum set of aggregations from which other aggregations can be derived. This will allow you to optimize the efficiency of your queries while maintaining reasonable limits on the size of your databases. • Usage-Based Optimization—You can tune the performance of a cube to provide quick response to the queries most often executed by using the Usage-Based Optimization Wizard to design aggregations appropriate to those queries while maintaining reasonable storage requirements. • Data Compression and Storage Optimization—In multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) and hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) storage modes, Analysis Services stores all or some of the cube information in multidimensional stru
