Advanced Cube Design - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 453

Working with Partitions
When building business intelligence solutions at the enterprise level it is com-
mon to work with terabytes of source (also known as fact or detail) data. You
can bet a company like Wal-Mart has many terabytes of detailed data feeding
into its business intelligence solutions. Even if you are working with just a few
hundred gigabytes, you will find the use of partitions to be critical to your suc-
cess.
By adding partitions to your overall cube design strategy, you can manage how
and where cube data is physically stored, how a cube is processed as well as
the time required for processing, and how efficiently Analysis Services 2005
can retrieve data in response to user queries. One key benefit of partitioning is
the distribution of data over and across one or more hard disk drives. And in
the case of remote partitions, the data can be spread over various machines.
Partitions can even be processed in parallel on the remote machines. In this
section, you first learn how to set up a local partition. Then, in the section that
follows, you learn how to set up a remote partition configuration — which, by
the way, is not the simplest procedure.
In order to work with partitions, you first need administrator privileges on both
the local and remote instances of Analysis Services you intend to use. Admin-
istrator privileges are granted to member groups or users assigned to the Ana-
lysis Services 2005 server role. Being a member of the server role is analog-
ous to being a member of the OLAP Administrator's group in Analysis Services
2000. To join the Server role first open SSMS and connect to each Analysis
Services instance you plan to use. For each instance, you need to perform the
following steps:
1. Right-click the instance name and select Properties. In the Analysis
Services Properties dialog, shown in Figure 9-57 , click the Security
tab in the top-left pane. Then, click the Add button.