SSAS Tabular - the more measure i created, the more time it need to Visual Studio to created a new measure

Question

Actually my issue is: the more measure i created, the more time it need to Visual Studio to created a new measure. (Visual Studio stay in not reponding)

The measures are not really complexe but actually it take thirty seconds~one minute to create a new measure (and i have around 50-100 measures actually).

The temporary solution i have actually is to create the measures in the code page but i was wondering about the scalabilty of ssas tabular if i have to create 100 measures again.

-My memory: 16 Go, 2,60GhZ i7. -The data in the fact table is about ~50 thousand lines. -I don't have other project open. -SQL server 2016, the SQL Server has the latest build 2020-09-28 (build: 13.0.5850.14). -i don't have build action and i don't backup the data to disk.

I was wondering if it's normal that visual studio take some times between the creation of each measure.

If you have some tips or advice don't hesitate to share:) Maybe i should try to split my measure per Fact Tables instead of created in one measure table? Maybe there are some parameters i can try to change?

Answer 1

Depending on a lot of things, like how the data looks (not only the number of rows in the fact table, but size etc), the hardware, network etc, I would say it's not very rare to experience some delays and slowness working with SSAS in visual studio when it starts loading data into the grids in the designer. As someone mentioned in the comments, there are third party alternatives for editing tabular models that doesn't have this behavior/functionality.

However, if you still want to use visual studio there are ways to possibly get around this. For example if you have a dedicated server/database for development purposes, where you have views as sources for the tables in the tabular model, you can add a TOP condition to the SELECT statement in the views to eliminate/limit the data loaded into visual studio during development.