A DBAs Guide to
Administering BI Systems
Robert L Davis
Program Manager: SQL MCM
Microsoft Corporation
Jonathan Foster
Sr. Service Engineer
Microsoft Corporation
October 11-14, Seattle, WA
Who am I?
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Microsoft Certified Master
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Learning Points
• Administration Tools for BI Systems
• SSAS Dynamic Management Views
• XMLA Scripting
• SSAS Tracing
• SSAS Maintenance Routines
• Real Stories of a BI Administrator
• Jonathan Foster (guest speaker)
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: DMVs
• MDX (multi-dimensional expressions)
• Rowsets presented as tables in $SYSTEM schema
• Database schema views (4)
• DBSCHEMA_xxx
• Data mining schema views(10)
• DMSCHEMA_xxx
• Metadata schema views (14)
• MDSCHEMA_xxx
• Discovery views (18)
• DISCOVER_xxx
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: DMVs
• Discovery views (18)
• DISCOVER_SESSIONS
• Open sessions
• Resource usage and activity
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: DMVs
• Discovery views (18)
• DISCOVER_COMMANDS
• Current or last executed command
• Resource usage and activity
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: DMVs
• Discovery views (18)
• DISCOVER_OBJECT_MEMORY_USAGE
• Memory resources used by objects
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: DMVs
• Discovery views (18)
• DISCOVER_PERFORMANCE_COUNTERS
• Performance information
• Query specific counters
• Must use SYSTEMRESTRICTSCHEMA()
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: XMLA
• XML for Analysis Services
• SSAS Trace
• Common maintenance tasks
• BACKUP
• RESTORE
• Create script via SSMS
• Automate via a SQL job
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: XMLA
• SSAS Trace
•
•
•
•
•
Create a trace of an Analysis Services instance
SUBSCRIBE to an active trace
CANCEL an active trace
Can be created with Profiler
Can be automated via a SQL job
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: XMLA
• BACKUP
<Backup xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine">
<Object>
<DatabaseID>Adventure Works DW 2008R2</DatabaseID>
</Object>
<File>c:\bak\Adventure Works DW 2008R2.abf</File>
</Backup>
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Administration Tools for BI Systems: XMLA
• RESTORE
<Restore xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine">
<File>c:\bak\Adventure Works DW 2008R2.abf</File>
<DatabaseName>Adventure Works DW 2008R2</DatabaseName>
<AllowOverwrite>true</AllowOverwrite>
<Security>IgnoreSecurity</Security>
<DbStorageLocation
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2008/engine/100/100">C:\
Program Files\Microsoft SQL
Server\MSAS10_50.MSSQLSERVER\OLAP\DATA\</DbStorageLocation>
</Restore>
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
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A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
- How To Expand Your Skillset, Work Less,
& Make More Money
…while administering a BI system.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
- Working Longer Hours is NOT the Answer
Don’t get caught!
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
- The Three Keys
• Administrate the System Effectively
• Achieve WorkLife Balance
• Actively Manage Your Career
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
- Administrate the System Effectively
•
•
•
•
Recognizing events and motives before an offense is
committed
Reactive Work vs. Proactive Work
Goal – the majority of your weekly effort is spent on
proactive work.
How can you achieve the goal as quickly as possible?
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
- What is the Present State of System Health?
System means end-to-end…every component.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
- What is the Present State of System Health?
What is the load pattern on my system?
• What resources are being consumed?
• When are these resources being consumed?
• Where is the load coming from?
• What is consuming these resources?
• How does the load map to my stakeholders?
• Just because there is load in a particular ETL doesn’t
mean its important to my stakeholders.
• This is why its important to know what interests your
stakeholders, and this changes all the time.
•
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
- Obtaining Meaningful Metrics
What is the source for these metrics?
• Dynamic Management Views –
• Monitoring Data
• Extended Events
• Performance Management Data Warehouse
Capturing the session information over time allows you to
do trend analysis and hotspot identification.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Know Thy Infrastructure
Know your servers
• What is under the hood?
•
•
•
•
Motherboard - bus speed, expansion slots
CPU - type, core count, speed
Memory - size and number of DIMS, expansion capability
NIC – bandwidth, teaming capability
• Include performance benchmark testing as a
formal release requirement. Go-Live doesn’t
happen until you’ve benchmarked the resource
consumption of the expected load.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Know Thy Infrastructure
Know your SAN
• Got admin access?
•
•
Take all the training your SAN vendor will pay for (negotiate
that into the contract)
Utilize the SAN vendor for performance tuning and watch
everything he does. Ask lots of questions.
• Don’t have admin access?
•
•
Take the SAN admin out to lunch and pick his brain.
Watch Brett Lawton’s 2010 Summit presentation on providing
meaningful metrics to SAN admins.
• Include performance benchmark testing as a formal
release requirement. Go-Live doesn’t happen until
you’ve benchmarked the resource consumption of the
expected load.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Know Thy Infrastructure
Know your network
• How big is the pipe from the source to the
destination?
What’s the bandwidth on the source NIC?
What’s the bandwidth on the destination NIC?
What’s the bandwidth on the switch for both servers?
What is the geographical distance between source and
destination?
• What is the latency rate between source and destination?
•
•
•
•
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Know Thy Infrastructure
Familiarize Yourself With New Hardware
Products
•
•
Hardware vendors are thrilled to share their product
information. Make contact and negotiate a try-before-youbuy deal.
DBA’s who know exactly what hardware should be
purchased and how it should be configured to achieve a
desired performance goal are rare.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Know Thy Infrastructure
Familiarize Yourself With New Platform
Changes
•
•
•
What are the new features in the next version of Windows
Server that will add stability and efficiency to the system?
What are the new features in the next version of SQL that will
add stability and efficiency to the system?
Are there other products or tools that can be used to add
stability and efficiency to the system?
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Quantify the Labor Cost
• You have to accurately measure the human effort involved in
administrating the system
• Tiered support costs
• Off hours support (24x7 coverage)
• Manual processes
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Now You Have Some Powerful Information
Understand your audience. Package the information you share wisely.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Understand What Interests Your Audience
Ops managers are typically interested in how much effort is required to
support the system
•
•
Track deployment effort and make sure to track the number of hotfixes required
for each release
Having some type of ticketing system is imperative. Funnel those one-off IM
chats, emails, and phone calls into formal tickets.
Business stakeholders are typically interested in incident and problem
mgmt.
•
•
All business requests must go through a formal ticket system
What kind or reports can you derive from the monitoring system in place?
•
Capture session data from the DMV’s into a history table for ongoing analysis. Be
hesitant to share this raw data with engineering teams.
Build SSRS or pivot reports to reduce the amount of time required by Ops to do
the analysis.
Engineering team is typically interested in performance.
•
Make sure you get it right the first time. Its always better to offer too little
information that is accurate than too much information that is inaccurate.
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Driving Mutually Beneficial Change
Consider delivering a regularly scheduled
service health report.
• Include metrics of interest to the big 3
•
•
•
Ops Mgr
Engineering Mgr
Business Stakeholder Mgr(s)
• Always include root cause for each problem
• Always include a solution for each problem
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
Provide Future State Direction
Know the strategic plan for BI
•
•
Where is the funding coming from?
Get to know the decision makers
•
Apportion at least 20% of your time to explore new
technologies
Build prototypes and give presentations to the decision
makers. Hardware vendors are too eager to loan their
products for POC.
Know how to move the data faster
•
Know how to reduce the human cost
•
•
•
Achieving work-life balance requires Operations-friendly
solutions.
Document and evangelize the Operations standards
Get a voice in the design phase
A DBAs Guide to Administering BI Systems
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Thank you
for attending this session and the
2011 PASS Summit in Seattle
October 11-14, Seattle, WA
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Session Code | Session Title
38