One Cube vs Multiple Cubes

One Cube vs Multiple Cubes

Chris Webb's BI Blog

One of the questions discussed in the book that Marco, Alberto and I wrote last year, “Expert Cube Development with SSAS 2008” (available in all good bookshops, folks!) was whether, if you have multiple fact tables, you should create one big cube with multiple measure groups or multiple cubes each with a single measure group. While I still stand by what we wrote then, I recently took part in an interesting debate on this subject in the MSDN Forum with Akshai Mirchandani from the dev team about the pros and cons of each approach where some interesting new details came to light:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlanalysisservices/thread/681e59bd-93ca-4a91-9f26-8ed96e825553

Here are the main points you need to consider when deciding whether to use the single cube approach or the multiple cube approach. In favour of the multiple cube approach:

• Having multiple, smaller cubes may result in faster query performance than one large cube in…

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