Sql-server – Handling Reporting Services and SharePoint Integration considering deprecation

Intuitively, if I was doing an OLAP solution for a retail chain, I'd say your infrastructure is really inappropriate for a system with substantial data volumes. This sort of kit has trouble with the data volumes you get in insurance, which is probably a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than I would expect to see in retail.

As gbn states in the comments, SSRS is just a web application. You can set up a farm - start with one server with a few GB of RAM and a couple of virtual CPUs. Monitor it, and expand it if it's overloaded.

The amount of disk space used by SSAS depends on the volume and the aggregations you put on the cubes. The storage format is quite compact - more so than SQL Server, but if you have large volumes of data it will start to get quite big. If it's getting into the 100+GB range then you should also look at partitioning.

A surprisingly applicable generic solution

Now, your client probably doesn't want to hear this, but VMs are not my recommended hardware configuration for any business intelligence solution. They work OK for transactional applications or anything that is not too computationally intensive. BI for a retail chain is probably a bit aggressive for this sort of infrastrucutre.

As a generic 'starter for 10', My recommended configuration is a bare metal 2-4 socket server like a HP DL380 or DL580, and direct attach SAS storage. The principal reason for this is that a machine of this sort is by far the best bang for buck as a B.I. platform and has a relatively modest entry price. If you put a HBA on the machine then you can mount a LUN off the SAN for backups.

IOPS for IOPS, this sort of kit is an order of magnitude cheaper than any SAN-based virutal solution, particularly on sequential workloads like B.I. The entry level for a setup of this configuration is peanuts - maybe £10-20,000 - and it's a lot cheaper and easier to get performance out of something like this than a VM based solution. For a first approximation, the only situation where this kit is inappropriate for B.I. work is when the data volumes get too large for it, and you need something like Teradata or Netezza.

What can you do with your VMs, though?

• A good start would be more RAM - try 32GB. SSAS is a biblical memory hog, and you've got slow infrastructure. If you're stuck with a VM, put as much RAM on it as possible. Disk access is slow on VMs.

• A second avenue is to partition the cube over multiple LUNs, where the LUNs are on separate physical arrays. Not all SANs will give you this much control, though. 80GB is getting into the range where you might get a benefit from parititioning, particularly if you've got a platform with slow I/O.

• Tune the buggery out of your cube aggregations - try usage based optimisation. The more hits you can get from aggregations the more efficient the server will be.

Without measuring your workload, I doubt anyone here is in a position to make recommendations that are any more specific than that. Although generic, the pointers above should be a reasonable start if you haven't implemented them yet.

Why are you running a log backup job on [ReportServerQA5TempDB]? It should be in simple mode.

From MSDN:

ReportServerTempdb is created with the primary report server database and is used to store temporary data, session information, and cached reports.

and

Use the simple recovery model to backup the reportservertempdb database.

Now the real question becomes, "What are you using for your backups?" Check to make sure that it's not changing the recovery model and that ReportServerTempDB is still in SIMPLE recovery model.

    SELECT name, recovery_model_desc
        FROM sys.databases;

I wonder if your solution is trying to switch back and forth between recovery models and is failing somewhere along the way. I have a vague recollection of this having happened to me in the past.

Try changing the recovery model to Simple and removing it from your hourly log backup job.

ALTER DATABASE ReportServerQA5TempDB SET RECOVERY SIMPLE;
GO