Scaling the Business Intelligence Environment

When performance issues arise in a business intelligence environment, it is time to look at scaling the solution. Scaling each of the business intelligence tools helps alleviate the performance issues and makes your users happy again. This chapter explains the scaling options for a business intelligence environment. First, it explains what scaling means, when we should scale, and what benefits we gain from scaling. Then, it describes the available scaling options and the different scaling architectures for several of the enterprise business intelligence tools. Each business intelligence tool involves a different process to scale. The process can involve hardware, software, and different configurations. The chapter discusses four of the enterprise business intelligence tools: Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Power Pivot, and Power View. Since scaling a business intelligence tool is for enterprise solutions, our Power Pivot scaling mostly focuses on the SharePoint Server side of things.