When the Analysis Services cube is finished, its life—from the developer's point of view—is over. Nevertheless, its real life, from the user's point of view, has just begun. During the development phase we probably didn't care too much about what would happen once the cube was in production, but of course there are a whole new set of problems that must be dealt with when a cube has gone live. We are going to address these problems in this chapter.
The focus is on the following topics:
Making changes to a cube once it has gone into production: Changes will still need to be made to the cube once it's in production, but we need to be very careful about how we make them in case we accidentally break reports, overwrite properties, or unprocess objects.
Managing partitions: Partitioning our cube is good for two reasons—to improve query performance and to reduce the amount of processing we need to do. In production, new data will need to be loaded into the cube on a...