Andrew Calvett's SQL Server Blog

Recently I was investigating why a new server which is in its parallel running phase was taking significantly longer to process the daily data than the server its due to replace.

The server has SQL & SSAS installed so the problem was not likely to be in the network transfer as its using shared memory. As i dug around the SQL dmv’s i noticed in sys.dm_exec_connections that the SSAS connection had a packet size of 8000 bytes instead of the usual 4096 bytes and from there i found that the datasource had been configured with the wrong provider but what was really interesting and the point of the blog is the performance difference which i have shown below.

That’s right! For a single partition, the native client was able to process 240,000 rows per second where as the .net client maxes out at 30,000. That means the SQL Native Client is 800% faster! I knew that the .net providers were slower but I had never gathered any metrics before. If your looking after a SSAS server I would definitely recommend taking a few minutes to check which provider is configured in the datasource.

Another point to consider is you may have a custom solution that is doing your ETL and utilising the .net providers. This would also be impacted by the .net provider throughput limits and a switch over to SSIS could dramatically improve your ETL.