I'm upgrading Analysis Services from 2008 R2 to 2012 and I'm finding that cube size grows significantly in the new version.
The same cube model imported into 2012 and rebuilt on the same timeline as an existing 2008 R2 cube takes up around 20% more space on disk in 2012 than it's 2008 R2 version.
While we can likely live with this I'm not seeing any reports of similar growth from other people using SQL Server Analysis Services - which makes me suspicious that something (a system setting or option) is the cause and could/should be corrected. I've carefully reviewed the instance properties across the two servers and don't see anything that suggests there's something amiss. It's occurring across a number of cubes, I'm measuring it at the folder level on the two servers (not in Management Studio or another tool), cube design & aggregations, etc. remain the same across the cubes and the underlying SAN and virtual machine infrastructure is shared.
Any ideas or reports of similar growth would be appreciated,
Bruce Carver