The first problem we'll face once a cube has gone into production is how to make changes to it without causing disruption to our users. In a development environment, we can generally make any changes to a cube we like because we are the only users of our cube. However, we need to be more careful when deploying changes to a cube into production for two reasons:
Some changes may result in cubes or dimensions becoming unprocessed. For example, adding a new calculated measure to a cube doesn't require any processing at all, but on the other hand, adding a new dimension means that the cube will need a Full Process. If we have a lot of data in our cube, a Full Process might take a long time, and our users will probably not want to have to wait to run their queries while this happens.
It's likely that our solution will not match the deployed version of the cube in some important respects. We saw in Chapter 9, Securing the Cube, that roles may be added or updated...