I've been involved recently in a quest to optimize an SSAS 2008 long-running query that would return the 12-month history of a KPI. Since the KPI was displayed on a dashboard page alongside other KPIs and charts, it was important to optimize the query as much possible. Rephrased to Adventure Works...
Scenario: You need to personalize the captions of calculated members or/and KPIs of an SSAS cube. For example, a solution vendor may need to deploy a cube to multiple clients. Instead of maintaining separate cube definitions, the vendor may prefer to change the captions of certain calculated members...
There is a nasty known bug with SSAS 2008, where if a query that requests two measures with Sum and LastNonEmpty aggregate functions side by side and the query uses NON EMPTY (which all OLAP clients use by default), the server forces the measure with the SUM function to display empty. Steps to repro...
Today, Microsoft released an updated feature pack for SQL Server 2008 RC0. Among other things, it includes: A web downloadable installer for Report Builder 2.0 which is not included anymore with the SQL Server 2008 setup An updated version of the RS add-in for SharePoint Analysis Services 10.0 OLE DB...
Here is a useful page from the SQL Server 2008 BOL that summarizes the SSAS performance improvements in Katmai pretty well. It also shows which functions are optimized. For example, the Lag function wasn't optimized in 2005 but now is.