Save your day with ProcessIncremental

Who claims not to have too long processing times in real-world analytic databases either is a lyer ...

... or he has the SSAS Enterprise Edition installed with the great "ProcessIncremental" processing mode. In principal, this is a clever usage of the "Partition Merge" option in that it allows to feed a tiny data set that is disjunct from the last processing slice into a temporary partition which is then merged with an existing partition that is to be extended.

In our current project, where we tried to setup a "ProcessUpdate" szenario, the complexity of dimension, partition changes and ProcessIndex calls had summed up to a period that was nearly as long as a full "Process" (~2h for 5GB/2 years of business data).

Now it seems that we will come down to around 10-20min which should give us a nice slap to our backs unless I did oversee something stupid, here.

Data Quality

Hilmar Buchta mentions in his Blog an new codeplex project with a (NUnit-based) testing suite to monitor the data quality in BI solutions. Seems to be quite useful.

Setting Locale-Specific Naming Size Information

In SSAS 2008, there is the possibility to translate a key-only attribute just on a locale-specific basis: The name in the default attribute properties is left empty and the individual name columns are associated on a per-attribute/locale basis in the translation tab.

When the size of those columns changes, there is now the need to adapt it also in the name mapping. The place to to this is not quite obvious since the name property of the attribute is now empty: When selecting the attribute in the translation tab, go to the properties view and unfold the "CaptionColumn" property. Here you will find the important mapping information that you need to manipulate.

Various (Non-)Ways for Hiding Trivial Members in Hierarchies

This is a link-collection that Martin has been doing when investigating, how and why the auto-hide-member of trivial members (they show a single child with the same semantics and are mostly artificially introduced to render unbalanced parent-child tress into balanced md-trees) does not work with Excel 2007 and SSAS 2008.

The Microsoft Documentation for the HideMemberIf-Property mentions the MDX Compatibility-Level of connections.

Chris Webb and Mark Russo describe how Excel 2007 overwrites the property value no matter what you specified.

There was a time when you could set the level in the registry back with SSAS 2000.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlanalysisservices/thread/aeca1ce0-e6aa-4fdc-b604-cc0e27b7ab5a/
--> in 2005 + 2008 ist der Registry-Eintrag nicht vorgesehen

Greg Galloway hacks Excel to be content overwriting only a first fake property:
Extended Properties="MDX Compatibility=2";MDX Compatibility=2;

However, in our experiments, this rendered the whole subbranch invisible.

Oh no, we do not sacrifice so much for that functionality.