Hardware Sizing a Tabular Solution (SQL Server Analysis Services)

Summary: Provides guidance for estimating the hardware requirements needed to support processing and query workloads for an Analysis Services tabular solution.

Introduction

This document provides hardware sizing guidance for in-memory Analysis Services tabular databases. Its goal is to help you determine the amount of memory and CPU resources needed to accommodate query and processing workloads in a production environment. NOTE: This guide is focused exclusively on in-memory tabular solutions. DirectQuery models, which execute queries against a backend relational database, have different resource requirements and are out of scope for this guide.

For in-memory solutions, the best query performance is typically realized on hardware that maximizes the following:

• Amount, bandwidth, and speed of memory
• Fast CPUs
• Onboard cache size

Notice that disk I/O is not a primary factor in sizing hardware for a tabular solution, as the model is optimized for in-memory storage and data access. When evaluating hardware for a tabular solution, your dollars are better spent on the memory subsystem rather than high performance disks.

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