ASO vs BSO

(from the archives December 2006)

During the course of a long series of performance tests in an exteded Proof of Concept during the Summer and Fall of 2005, we were able to quantify the performance of Essbase ASO vs BSO.

We had three different models that were provided to us by our customer to test various types of performance on cubes. They were small, medium and large. The large cube expanded to about 1GB with a fully calculated BSO model. On the hardware provided given the data set it took on about 3 minutes to calculate the necessary cells and then processing queries against it took about 7 seconds. We essentially reduced calc times to zero upon conversion to ASO. The only associated ‘calc time’ was that done with reporting. The resulting queries processed within 15 seconds.

We were able to process the large database on a laptop in ASO faster than on a four way Intel server in BSO. These results were similar against the medium and small databases.

ASO allows the database to be optimized according to the most frequently processed queries against it. This optimization is much more granular than optimizations against BSO. Whereas an entire database is optimized under BSO when fully calculated, only select pieces of an ASO database need be optimized – those pieces most likely to be queried.

 Furthermore, we showed the Essbase ASO to be a faster performer in all cases than Microsoft’s Analytical Services under both SQL Server 2000 and the advance version of Yukon.

 Our experience with this customer in a very strictly controlled environment confirmed our expectations of ASO databases to outperform BSO databases in the following areas:

1. Load times: Overall about 20% faster
2. Calculation times: Overall about 20X faster
3. Query times: Over all about 5% slower
4. Storage Space: Overall about 10X smaller.
5. Memory Utilization: Overall about the same.

The advantages of the newer versions of Essbase over prior versions are significant and migration is simple. Conversion of BSO to ASO without modification can be performed on about 70% of Essbase databases in a typical customer. Even for those that cannot be directly converted, ASO partitioning allows customers to take advantage.

Comments

[hariprasad]

Can you please clarify me on the same platform with two different application
1.ASO type with less volume db(5mb)
and 2.BSO with high volume db(5gb)
which will use more DB cpu when we fire some query and why

[Gopi]

we need more indepth regarding BSO to ASO.

[tahar]

hello,
I need more information for ASO and BSO