Processing Analysis Services dimensions and partitions is a resource-intensive operation. It should use all of the resources—CPU, memory, and disk I/O—available to Analysis Services. For this reason, it is important to be able to understand the impact of processing operations on the operating system, as we saw earlier on in this chapter.
When a database goes into production, Analysis Services processing usually takes place on a rigid schedule. We should monitor processing for the following two reasons:
Optimize processing times: Usually we want to reduce the time required to process partitions and dimensions.
Check for any increase in the processing window over time: The amount of time processing takes could increase over time, especially if we are running a full process on our database. We want to ensure that the amount of time processing takes won't exceed our assigned processing timeslot. To do that, we need to log information about the start and finish...