How to change the Storage mode of a Dimension

Friends,

As you all know there are three types of Storage Modes in SSAS. Click on the links to know more about the same.

• MOLAP
• ROLAP
• HOLAP

The Default storage mode is MOLAP for both dimensions and mesaure groups. Let’s see the steps involved in chenging the Storage modes of a dimension.

• Open project in BIDS.
• Open the dimension to which the Storage Mode needs to be changed.
• press F4 or properties button by selecting the dimension.
• There you can see storage mode property which is set to MOLAP by default and change it to the type of your wish. In the below example I am changing it to ROLAP.

This is it. Now the magic is here. Let’s see what will happen when I process the dimension now. You can see that the data is not reading for this dimension as ROLAP stores the data in relational database only and hence ONLY Aggregations and Indexes will be created that too on Relational database.

To give you clear picture, now I changed the storage mode back to MOLAP and processed the same and see the difference in the below pic. In this pic it is clearly visible that for MOLAP storage type, SSAS server reads the data and stores in SSAS Server.

Keep the TWO pics open and see the difference .. 🙂

Regards,
Roopesh Babu V