I came across this very handy tip to increase SSAS processing speed in SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services Operations Guide and thought it is worth sharing.
The guide recommendes using Shared Memory Protocol when getting data from the relational data source if it is SQL Server and both SSAS and SQL Server are on the same physical box. Exchaning data over shared memory is much faster than over TCP/IP as you probably already know. You will need to perform two steps to force SSAS data source to use shared memory while querying underlying SQL Server.
1. Check that Shared Memory Protocol is enabled in SQL Server configuration manager.
2. Prefix the data source connection string in SSAS with :lpc like below.
Provider=SQLNCLI10.1;Data Source=lpc:ThisServer\INST1;Integrated Security=SSPI;Initial Catalog=WordMatch
The guide claims to have achieved 112,000 rows per second using TCP/IP where as 180,000 rows per second using shared memory which is impressive. In my own test, a slightly modified Adventure Works cube took 56 seconds to process using TCP-IP whereas 47 seconds using shared memory; an improvement of 16%.
