SQL Server Advent Calendar 3 – Analysis Services Backup

Day 3 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008..

Backing up of analysis services in SQL Server 2005 ran out for steam for databases of about 20Gb, and so you have to follow a different route to back them up (see this technet article).  The time taken to back up a database does not grows faster than the growth in size of that database. e.g. doubling the size of the data might mean the backup takes 3 times longer.

This has been fixed in SQL Server 2008 as the backup process has been completely rewritten and now closely follows the time it would take to copy the physical files.  This means that the simple backup in analysis services can now cope with data sizes of 100Gb plus which is pretty good when you remember that the analysis services database is typically a quarter or a sixth of the size of the relational database the data came from.

Finally,it’s a trivial exercise to migrate an analysis services databases from SQL Server 2005 to 2008 either through a backup restore or by opening and deploying the source project to analysis services 2008.

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