Managing processing

During development, we can process cubes or dimensions whenever we want; in a production environment, processing needs more thought though. On a very simple project, we might be able to get away with doing a Full Process on our entire Analysis Services database if it only takes a few minutes to complete. However, we usually have large data volumes to manage and a limited amount of time to perform any processing, so a Full Process simply isn't feasible - we need to think carefully about how we can only process the data that needs to be processed, and do that processing in the most efficient way possible.

Analysis Services processing can be broken down into two different tasks:

• Dimension Processing: This involves loading data into a dimension and building indexes on it.

• Partition Processing: This is more complex. Before we can query a cube, all of the dimensions in the cube need to be processed, and we need to process the cube itself too. A cube is made up of measure groups...