SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services performance guide - process to go over

SQL Server 2008 is on full-fledge now and I haven't had a chance to look at Analysis Services part of it, recently had an opportunity to go through to convene a proof of concept project at work place.

As the documentation refers this version of Analysis Services, special emphasis was taken to improve the performance in the execution of MDX calculations. Also the engine architecture has been enhanced for better performance with a chance to optimize your MDX code. To give more information on these performance improvement aspects here is the extract from a whitepaper: 

Enhancing Query Performance - Query performance directly impacts the quality of the end user experience. As such, it is the primary benchmark used to evaluate the success of an online analytical processing (OLAP) implementation. Analysis Services provides a variety of mechanisms to accelerate query performance, including aggregations, caching, and indexed data retrieval. In addition, you can improve query performance by optimizing the design of your dimension attributes, cubes, and Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) queries.

Enhancing Processing Performance - Processing is the operation that refreshes data in an Analysis Services database. The faster the processing performance, the sooner users can access refreshed data. Analysis Services provides a variety of mechanisms that you can use to influence processing performance, including efficient dimension design, effective aggregations, partitions, and an economical processing strategy (for example, incremental vs. full refresh vs. proactive caching).

Tuning Server Resources – There are several engine settings that can be tuned that affect both querying and processing performance.

You can download the SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services performance guide white paper describes how application developers can apply query and processing performance-tuning techniques to their SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services OLAP solutions. This document will help you understand where issues can occur in your existing MDX code that will prevent you from experiencing the performance improvements, and provide advice on how to avoid these issues in your new MDX coding. This document also includes a list of the functions that benefit from the performance improvements