Vidas Matelis Analysis Services Blog

I just recently started to learn a bit more about Analysis Services data mining. I am very impressed how Excel 2007 add-ins makes data mining user friendly. All technical stuff is hidden, you just select your data in Excel, run add-in and review results. Behind the scene this add-in generates SSAS data mining model and process it with provided data. Of course, for more complicated stuff you will have to learn SSAS data mining to have a better control on how data mining project is build.

Just today in Microsoft webcast newsletter I noticed that there are 7 Analysis Services data mining webcasts scheduled for November. If you are also interested in this technology, make sure you don’t miss them:

I was looking into some issues with using Analysis Services translations and found not related to my problem, but new to me information about SSAS configuration property EnableFast1033Locale. From BOL:

If you use the English (United States) language identifier (0x0409, or 1033) as the default language for the Analysis Services instance, you can get additional performance benefits by setting the EnableFast1033Locale configuration property, an advanced configuration property available only for that language identifier. Setting the value of this property to true enables Analysis Services to use a faster algorithm for string hashing and comparison.

I found this properly in the msmdsrv.ini file (default folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\OLAP\Config):

 <EnableFast1033Locale>0</EnableFast1033Locale>

I did some tests and found that you have to drop all databases from SSAS server before you change property value to 1. Then you have to restart server and re-deploy and re-process all databases. I found that even Adventure Works DW database would not work without redeployment. My other test databases were also giving me different errors until I redeployed and reprocessed them.

I could not see performance differences on my small tests databases. But for a big installations with 1033 locale it could be worth to see if this could give you some performance boost.

As as side effect I noticed, that when EnableFast1033Locale property value is set to 1, in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio server properties window was always giving me error when clicking on “OK” button:

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
——————————
Errors in the metadata manager. LOG file extension can be only .LOG.
Errors in the metadata manager. An error occurred while setting the value for the ‘ConfigurationSettings\Log\File’ configuration property.
 (Microsoft.AnalysisServices)

To go around this problem just change required property values directly in msmdsrv.ini file.