Using the Timeout connection string property is a good way of making sure that your queries don’t run for too long, but sometimes – for example when you’re using SSRS – you want to restrict the amount of data that a query returns. You can’t properly do this with Analysis Services, but it is almost possible…

Consider the following query on Adventure Works:

SELECT
{[Measures].[Internet Sales Amount],[Measures].[Internet Tax Amount]}
ON 0,
[Date].[Date].[Date].MEMBERS
ON 1
FROM [Adventure Works]

It returns 1189 rows and 3 columns. If you click on any of the cells containing data in SQL Management Studio, to see the cell properties, you’ll see that the CellOrdinal property contains the index of each cell in the cellset. So the top left hand cell is ordinal 0, the one to its right is 1, and so on until the last column where it starts again one row down:

Using the BeginRange and EndRange connection string properties, you can limit the cells in a cellset that actually get populated with data. Note that you can’t restrict the overall number of cells though, which would be more useful. Both these properties take an integer value which represents a cell ordinal: BeginRange is the first cell ordinal you want to contain data, EndRange is the last cell ordinal. Their default value is –1, which for BeginRange means start at the first cell ordinal and for EndRange means end at the last cell ordinal. So, for example, with BeginRange=4 and EndRange=7, running the query above would give the following output:

As I said, the overall number of cells in the cellset remains the same, but only the cells in the range we specified actually contain data. This ‘filtering’ happens after the query axes have been resolved, as far as I can see, so adding NON EMPTY on Rows for example does not filter out any of the empty rows. If you were using SSRS, however, you could do this filtering at the DataSet level.

If you look in Profiler you’ll see that these properties have an affect on the amount of work SSAS does at query time. On a cold cache, with no BeginRange and EndRange set, the query scans all of the year partitions in the Internet Sales measure group as you would expect. But with BeginRange and EndRange set as above, on a cold cache SSAS only reads data from the 2001 partition.

BTW, remember that if you’re experimenting with these connection string properties in SQLMS, when you’re finished you’ll need to either close and reopen SQLMS or set BeginRange=-1 and EndRange=-1 as a result of this bug (which still doesn’t seem to be fixed in SP1).