Optimizing performance of OLAP systems built with MS Analysis Services 2005

This work covers optimization of OLAP systems. In the beginning we define terms of business intelligence and OLAP systems which purpose is to support making effective decisions in organizations. The core of this work is a description of possible methods for improvement of processing and querying times in OLAP systems built with the product SQL Server Analysis Services 2005. There are many different optimization methods and we arranged them into the following fields: data warehouse, design of the data cube, querying performance, processing performance, special designs, server settings and hardware. The goal of this work is to test and assess individual optimization methods. For each method we are interested in the amount of possible performance improvement. Finally we would like to find out which methods are the most effective. We tested our optimization methods on the real data from a Slovenian company. After each optimization step we measured processing time and time required to get results from the test queries. At the end we analyze the results and give final findings and recommendations