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.