We have an SSAS 2008 R2 instance with cubes that are processed during business hours. It's located on the same box as our SQL 2008 R2 datawarehouse that we're reading to refresh the information.
Our problem is that when we're processing our dimensions and cubes (which take about an hour each time) it seems that all user tools are unable to connect. Excel, PowerPivot, SSMS, and ReportBuilder all hang on the creation of the connection.
Note: The 1 hour processing time is actual processing time - we have a very unforgiving 10 minute query timeout and a small number of users at this point so I don't believe we have long running queries creating a cascade of locks like I've read of in some places.
This leads me to a couple questions:
1) Is it not correct that users should be able to query against the cubes while they're processing because it does the process separately and then "commits" after completion? And isn't this "commit" usually a quick process? In other words - while we're processing for an hour the commit should only be right at the end and not impact users much.
2) Is it a bad practice to have our SQL and SSAS instances on the same box because of resource contention? Is this documented somewhere? I'm working on confirming now that with SQL being as greedy as it is with hardware resources that there's just not enough CPU/Memory left over for SSAS to instantiate a new connection when we're reading from SQL and processing SSAS.
Some discussions I've already read:
Thanks,
Justin