Clone Analysis Services Partitions with PowerShell
Most of us with large Analysis Services cubes partition our cubes by month or year or some other time-based slice and we have all, at one point or another, developed some way to create partitions for new months on-demand. Often, the solution to this seems to be a C# console application or SSIS package using AMO to create a new partition based off an existing partition. The problem I see with this is that maintaining it requires opening up the project or package, making changes, re-compiling, deploying, testing, deploying to production, verifying, etc. It also requires that whoever is going to maintain it is comfortable with C#.
To simplify the maintenance and get rid of the "black box" factor that utility apps like this tend to have, I put together a PowerShell script to do the same thing and a stored procedure to call the script. Really, it doesn't matter what you use as you're most likely using an almost identical chunk of code to get your new partition created - my argument is that using PowerShell instead of C# or SSIS reduces the cost of maintenance, improves readability, and facilitates better understanding throughout your team.
Wouldn’t it be fun if Cubes could talk?
I didn't say "wouldn't it be useful" because after putting a test together, asking a cube questions with no context tends to return answers that it probably shouldn't have returned. In BI, it is incredibly important to understand what exactly it is you're asking for - if we just say we want "sales" and return an answer, nobody really knows what we meant by "sales." Sure, in various circles, "sales" means the same thing - but once you start talking to different areas, departments, etc - the meaning of the word starts to shift.
But I digress - asking cubes questions is still pretty fun and some of the random things it returns when you point it at your own cubes can be flat out hilarious.
Here's a few questions thrown at the Adventure Works cube in the Adventure Works DW 2008 Analysis Services database