Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Overview of this book

Microsoft's SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 is an OLAP server that allows users to analyze business data quickly and easily. However, designing cubes in Analysis Services can be a complex task: it's all too easy to make mistakes early on in development that lead to serious problems when the cube is in production. Learning the best practices for cube design before you start your project will help you avoid these problems and ensure that your project is a success. This book offers practical advice on how to go about designing and building fast, scalable, and maintainable cubes that will meet your users' requirements and help make your Business Intelligence project a success. This book gives readers insight into the best practices for designing and building Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 cubes. It also provides details about server architecture, performance tuning, security, and administration of an Analysis Services solution. In this book, you will learn how to design and implement Analysis Services cubes. Starting from designing a data mart for Analysis Services, through the creation of dimensions and measure groups, to putting the cube into production, we'll explore the whole of the development lifecycle. This book is an invaluable guide for anyone who is planning to use Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 in a Business Intelligence project.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Making changes to a cube in production


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 the cube into production for two reasons:

  • Some changes we make may result in cubes or dimensions becoming unprocessed. Adding a new calculated measure to a cube doesn't require any processing at all; adding a new dimension to a cube 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 BI Development Studio solution will not match the deployed version of the cube in some important respects. We saw in Chapter 9 that roles may be added or updated on an Analysis...