Processing Cubes Using the OLAP Manager

This topic describes complete processing of a cube. Perform this type of processing on a cube after you complete any of the following activities:

• Build the cube and design its storage options and aggregations.
• Change the cube’s metadata (measures, dimensions, and so on) and decide to incorporate the changes in the cube.
• Change the structure of a shared dimension used in the cube and process the shared dimension.

Caution If a shared dimension’s structure is updated and saved but not processed, it will automatically be processed when any cube incorporating the dimension is processed. At that time any other cubes that incorporate the dimension immediately become unavailable to users and must be processed before they can be used again.

Virtual cubes also require complete processing after you build them, change their metadata, or change one of their shared dimensions.

This type of processing completely restructures a cube and recalculates and reloads its data.

Other, less extensive types of updates to cubes are adequate in other situations. For more information, see Updating and Refreshing Cube Data.

Referential integrity of the data warehouse is not verified by Microsoft® SQL Server™ OLAP Services. So, for example, if the cube’s fact table contains foreign key values that are not present in a joined dimension table’s primary key column, the rows containing those values are not processed. In this case, processing does not produce an error message, but the cube contains incomplete and therefore inaccurate data.

Depending on the size of your cube, processing may take considerable time.

The storage required for temporary files during processing can be substantially larger than the final size of the cube. If during processing you exhaust the free space of the disk containing your temporary file folder, you can specify a folder on another disk with more free space. For more information, see Properties Dialog Box - General Tab.

Note Newly processed cubes are visible to client users only after they reconnect to the server computer.

To process a cube

1. In the OLAP Manager tree view, under a database, expand the Cubes folder.
2. Right-click the cube, and then click Process.
3. In the Process a Cube dialog box, click Process, and then click OK.
4. In the Process dialog box, wait for the cube to finish processing, or click Stop to halt and cancel processing.

To process a virtual cube

1. In the OLAP Manager tree view, under a database, expand the Virtual Cubes folder.
2. Right-click the virtual cube, and then click Process.
3. In the Process dialog box, wait for the virtual cube to finish processing, or click Stop to halt and cancel processing.

After processing completes but before you close the Process dialog box, you can view the SQL statement used to process the cube.

To view an SQL statement

1. In the Process dialog box, click a line beginning with the SQL icon.
2. Click View Details.