If you have ever encountered the error message File system error: a FileStore error from WriteFile occurred, then you will probably be all too familiar with the reason for this message. In a multidimensional database, strings are stored using a different architecture to numeric data so that performance optimizations can be made based on data characteistics.
A dimension attribute such as a name or location could be considered as string data. Also a string data is used for distinct count measures and keys. SQL Server's default behavior is to store the string data in a file (.string) that has a 4GB size limit. This still exists as the default in SQL Server 2012, but this edition introduces a new storage feature called scalable string storage that allows you to overcome this limit. This allows the string store to grow as the data stored increases in size.
