What is the server mode of an Analysis Services instance?

In SQL Analysis Service  2012 (SSAS) a new server mode is introduced, the tabular mode. This mode is available when you are installing SQL 2012 Enterprise edition or Business Intelligence edition. More details about edition features click here. To deploy a tabular model, for instance a Power Pivot tabular model which you have converted to an SSAS tabular model, you need to have a SSAS server which is running in tabular model. In this blog I will describe how you can detect the mode in which your SSAS server is running.
The model in which the SSAS server is running is determined during the installation of the SSAS server. The model can't be changed afterwards.

To retrieve the Server mode on a running server, Start SQL Management Studio 2012. You can't use a lower version of SSMS like 2008 R2. These lower versions are not aware of this new SSAS modes.
Connect to Analysis Server. Retrieve the Analysis Server properties.

The connected user is not an Analysis Services server administrator. Only an administrator can make changes to server properties

You are a part of the local administrators group on the server. You want to add a user to the Server administrator group of your Analysis Server. After adding the user you will get next error message: The connected user is not an Analysis Services server administrator.  Only an administrator can make changes to server properties.

Solution: Start SQL Server Management Studio with the option 'Run as Administrator'. Now it is possible to add users to the Server administrator group of your Analysis Server.

White paper Analysis Services 2008 R2 Performance Guide

This month Thomas Kejser and Denny Lee published the white paper: Analysis Services 2008 R2 Performance Guide. This white paper describes how business intelligence developers can apply query and processing performance-tuning techniques to their Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services OLAP solutions.

This guide contains information about building and tuning Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 R2 cubes for the best possible performance. It is primarily aimed at business intelligence (BI) developers who are building a new cube from scratch or optimizing an existing cube for better performance.
The goal of this guide is to provide you with the necessary background to understand design tradeoffs and with techniques and design patterns that will help you achieve the best possible performance of even large cubes.
Cube performance can be divided into two types of workload: query performance and processing performance. Because these workloads are very different, this paper is organized into four main sections.
Design Patterns for Scalable Cubes – No amount of query tuning and optimization can beat the benefits of a well-designed data model. This section contains guidance to help you get the design right the first time. In general, good cube design follows Kimball modeling techniques, and if you avoid some typical design mistakes, you are in very good shape.
Tuning Query Performance - Query performance directly impacts the quality of the end-user experience. As such, it is the primary benchmark used to evaluate the success of an online analytical processing (OLAP) implementation. Analysis Services provides a variety of mechanisms to accelerate query performance, including aggregations, caching, and indexed data retrieval. This section also provides guidance on writing efficient Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) calculation scripts.
Tuning Processing Performance - Processing is the operation that refreshes data in an Analysis Services database. The faster the processing performance, the sooner users can access refreshed data. Analysis Services provides a variety of mechanisms that you can use to influence processing performance, including parallelized processing designs, relational tuning, and an economical processing strategy (for example, incremental versus full refresh versus proactive caching).
Special Considerations – Some features of Analysis Services such as distinct count measures and many-to-many dimensions require more careful attention to the cube design than others. At the end of the paper you will find a section that describes the special techniques you should apply when using these features.

Whitepaper: Analysis Services Operatings Guide (SSAS)

Microsoft has published the whitepaper: Analysis Services Operatings Guide. In this guide you will find information on how to test and run Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 R2 in a production environment. The focus of this guide is how you can test, monitor, diagnose, and remove production issues on even the largest scaled cubes. This paper also provides guidance on how to configure the server for best possible performance. It is the goal of this guide to make your operations processes as painless as possible, and to have you run with the best possible performance without any additional development effort to your deployed cubes. In this guide, you will learn how to get the best out of your existing data model by making changes transparent to the data model and by making configuration changes that improve the user experience of the cube.However, no amount of operational readiness can cure a poorly designed cube. Although this guide shows you where you can make changes transparent to end users, it is important to be aware that there are cases where design change is the only viable path to good performance and reliability. Cubes do not take away the ubiquitous need for informed data modeling. Fortunately, this operations guide has a companion volume targeted at developers: the Analysis Services Performance Guide. We highly recommend that your developers read that white paper and follow the guidance in it.

Enjoy reading the whitepaper Analysis Services Operatings Guide. To directly download the whitepaper from the Microsoft Download Center click here.

No mapping between account names and security IDs was done

Last week I encountered this error when I was processing my SSAS Cube for the Januari 2011 figures. This error also occured if I tried to process a dimension. In the last months no changes were made in my datawarehouse project, so I was very suprised to get this error message. This error messsage is nice from a technical perspective but it will not tell what I need to do. It would be nice if it could tell me which account names or security ID's are not mapped. After some research in my cube I found the problem. In my datawarehouse project I have defined roles for people who can access my cube. In one of these roles, an active directory account was configured for a user who left my company this month. His Active Directory account was removed from Active Directory. So my datawarehouse project roles contained Active Directory accounts which does not exist anymore.

Solution: Remove all Active Directory accounts from the roles which does not exists anymore in Active Directory.

Credit: Nick J Webb