The AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog Analysis Services Server Property

In Shabnam Watson’s recent blog post on a bug she found when trying to create a Live connection from Power BI to Analysis Services she mentioned that the AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog server property could be used to solve her problem. This piqued my interested because I’d seen this property but had no idea what it did exactly or why it was there. Luckily, now I work for Microsoft, it’s even easier for me to find out about things like this from the dev team and Akshai Mirchandani was able to help.

First of all, what does it do? The documentation on this property has just been added here, and this is what it says:

AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog
A Boolean property. When set to true, new client connections automatically default to the first catalog (database) the user has permissions to connect to.
When set to false, no initial catalog is specified. Clients must select a default catalog prior to running queries or discover operations against a database on the server. If no default catalog is specified, an error is returned. If Initial Catalog property is specified in the connection string, the default catalog will be applied from this property.

The default value for this property is true.

Let me illustrate what this means. Say you have an instance of Analysis Services (in this case it’s Tabular, but it could be Multidimensional) with two databases on it:

I’ve expanded the Roles tab for each database reasons that will become clear later.

Next, let’s say you run a simple trace on this server looking at the Discover End and Session Initialize events:

…and while this trace is running, you open up SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the SSAS instance. Here’s what you see in Profiler:

Now, just to be clear, all I did was open up SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the instance. I did not open up a DAX query window or anything like that; all that happened was the list of databases on the instance was displayed in the Object Explorer pane.

The interesting thing to notice from the trace above is that when I did that there are five Session Initialize events and even though the Database column in Profiler is blank, you can see from the list of role names in the TextData column that in each case a connection has been made to the Adventure Works Internet Sales database.

This is because when you open a connection to Analysis Services and do not set the Initial Catalog connection string property, what happens is that you will get a connection to the default database on the instance. Which database is the default? It’s just the first database that the user has permission to access on the instance, which is a bit random.

This happens at other times too. Let’s say you right click on the EmptyDB database and process it in SQL Management Studio:

Here’s what I see in Profiler:

In this case there are three connections to the default database, Adventure Works Internet Sales, when the database I am processing is EmptyDB!

Most of the time these unnecessary connections have no impact at all but sometimes they can cause problems such as the ones Shabnam describes in her blog post. For example:

• It can cause performance problems, because there is an overhead to opening a connection – for example roles are evaluated when a connection is opened
• Monitoring and auditing gets complicated because, as you can see from the traces above, there are a whole lot of connections to the default database taking place that you aren’t expecting
• Most importantly, when a connection is opened a read-commit lock is acquired on that database and in a few rare cases this can cause deadlocks and other locking-related issues

This is why the AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog server property was introduced. With this server property set to False, when you open a connection to SSAS with no Initial Catalog set, then you get a connection with no database set. You can find this server property in SQL Server Management Studio in the Analysis Server properties dialog (which you can find by right-clicking on your instance name, selecting Properties, and going to the General tab) and checking the Advanced (All) Properties box.

With AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog set to False, here’s what Profiler shows when I rerun my original test of connecting to SQL Server Management Studio:

Note that there are now no Session Initialize events now.

Here’s what opening up a new MDX query window in SQL Management Studio shows with AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog set to False if you don’t explicitly set a database when you connect:

Note the empty database dropdown box on the toolbar and the “Error loading metadata: No cubes were found” error message shown in the Metadata pane.

So why didn’t the dev team set AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog to False by default on new instances? The problem with doing this is that it is a potential breaking change that could cause errors in some client tools. I’m not aware of any specific cases where this might happen but if you did decide to change AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog to False on your instance you would need to test thoroughly to make sure it didn’t break anything. My feeling is, though, it is probably a good idea to AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog to False on production servers and do the appropriate testing just in case those unnecessary connections are causing problems.