Excluding Analysis Services files from Anti Virus scanning

I’ve been on New Orleans time all this working week and have been up late at night, not doing much, just hitting the ‘random’ button on DBA Reactions (and posting them on Twitter) when I came across this one on Anti Virus running on SQL file-types.

“Good one” I thought to myself. And then I wondered if any of the files that make up the cubes on our SSAS boxes were being scanned or whether they were excluded. We have some big cubes in our system, and by big i mean TB’s worth of cubes, some of them over 700GB. So I fired up the System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection on one of the SSAS boxes, and sure enough, all files were being scanned. But should they? This Microsoft KB article confirmed my suspicions that they can be exempt from scanning: How to choose antivirus software to run on computers that are running SQL Server