OLAP Cube Maximum Size

[milts]

Hi,

I would like to know if there is a limitation regarding the size of an OLAP cube?

Thanks!

[TSBruce]

There is no technical limit to the size of an OLAP cube.  However, there may be environmental limits (disk space, memory, etc.) as well as practical considerations (does a cube really need 25 years of history, or is 5 years enough)?  I would also ensure that large cubes are tuned properly with all of the proper aggregations to maximize performance.

[milts]

Thanks for this clarification!

[LinusH]

There are very few limitations for SAS OLAP Cubes.

The only ones I come to think of is number of herarchies (128) and measures (1024).

In my opinion they are no real life limitations. I can't see an end user chsoing between thousands of measeures and hundreds of hierarchies...

/Linus

[milts]

Thank you for your responses. But have you encountered an out of memory error when viewing reports with an OLAP data source? Which configurations can I check? Is there a limit if the environment is 32-bit versus 64-bit Windows?

[LinusH]

Maybe you could track this to SAS support.

Some monitoring is available in the OLAP Server Monitor plug-in for SAS Management Console.

Also check the IP admin docs:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/biasag/62612/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p13sasapplicserver0...

[cbasah]

It happened to me once and increasing the JVM's initial memory helps. Trying increasing the -Xmx and -Xms parameters when launching the OLAP server.

[boschy]

We recently got out-of-memory errors when opening cubes after upgrading from SAS V9.2 M1 to M3 and from Web Report Studio V4.2 to V4.3.

Turns out that we were unknowingly selecting ALL fields in the cube for display in Web Report Studio via the Select Data panel, instead of selecting say 2 or 3 dimensions and a few measures.

And so selecting all fields caused the OLAP server to generate a CROSSJOIN for all dimensions (say 25 of them) and all measures. With 250,000 rows, this blew the Java VM memory allocation every time, regardless of how much memory was allocated.

[RobertH]

128 dimensions is a limit for financial services :smileycry:

http://goo.gl/sMDSD

• max measures / cube = 1024
• max dimensions / cube = 128
• max levels / cube = 256
• max levels / hierarchy = 19
• max properties / level = 256
• max members / hierarchy = 2^32
• max unique values / cube = 16.777.215 (hotfix required)

[DLanningham]

Also, see the topic "SAS OLAP Cube Size Specifications" in the SAS OLAP Server User's Guide. 

This topic discusses size specifications for dimensions, hierarchies, levels, measures and properties.