Reposted from Chris Webb's blog with the author's permission.
Building aggregations in your SSAS Multidimensional will make your queries faster, right? While that’s true, they will only make a noticeable difference to performance if your query has Storage Engine-related problems rather than Formula Engine-related problems. What’s more, even when do you have Storage Engine-related problems there are some cases where you may find that aggregations don’t give you the kind of performance boost that you expect. In this post I’ll explain why this can happen, how you can use the Resource Usage Profiler event (as described in parts 1 and 2 of this series) to find out when this is happening, and how you can deal with the problem.