Excel 2007 Hangs When Trying to Edit an OLAP Cube Filter
Ok, it doesn't hang every time you try to edit an OLAP cube filter, but sometimes - it appears to. In reality, I've never seen it permanently hang - just kind of go away for a while. Here's the basic symptom that the business will report to you:
"Excel freezes (or hangs) when I try to change this filter"
Most of us have seen this at one point or another and shrugged it off as a busy time or processing is going on or there are cats clogging up the tubes, etc. Tonight, I finally decided to figure out what's causing it.
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
Charting Analysis Services 2008 Trace Events
The other day I was running some Analysis Services traces for some reason or another and ran across Chris Webb's post on (Visualising Analysis Services Trace Information in Reporting Services). After looking over that post, I thought it'd be interesting to visualize various types of processing, queries, etc - basically take a trace and then graph out what happened and when. Here's a few samples of what the project yielded:
- Red: Cube Processing on a 2 Minute schedule
- Green: Cube Processing on a 1 hour schedule
- Blue: Cube Processing on a 1 hour schedule
- Black: Query Activity
Most of the activity here is from SSRS subscriptions firing around 8AM
SQL Server Analysis Services Command (XMLA) Agent Job Step Reports Success On Command Failure
I ran in to this the other day, did some googling, and really did not like what I saw for workarounds. In SQL Server 2005, when an XMLA job step fails (returns an Exception node in the XML response), the job step still reports success (because it's defining success as "did I get a response") - this has been fixed in SQL Server 2008. Common workarounds are using ascmd.exe or SSIS to handle the XMLA commands (ish - both of those solutions add a lot of complexity for a simple problem). So, I came up with a workaround that checks the text of the previous job step for the substring "<Exception ". It's been working thus far, with no issues.
After each XMLA command step, insert a T-SQL step to verify that the XMLA command step succeeded:
DECLARE @JobName VARCHAR(64) SET @JobName = ‘Name OF Job This Step Belongs TO’ DECLARE @Message VARCHAR(1024) SELECT TOP 1 @Message = CAST([message] AS VARCHAR(1024)) FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobhistory a INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobs b ON a.job_id = b.job_id AND b.[NAME] = @JobName ORDER BY run_date DESC, run_time DESC, step_id DESC IF @Message LIKE ‘%<Exception %’ RAISERROR (@Message, 17, 1)
UPDATE (2009-04-03): Added , step_id DESC to ORDER BY clause - when the XMLA job fails instantly (say you tried to process a nonexistant partition), run_time doesn't have enough granularity to sort properly.
Once your done, your job steps will look something like this:
Dynamic MDX queries in TSQL
Say you want to run the same MDX query for each row in a given rowset. I needed to do this for alerting purposes, where there were different alert thresholds for different attribute values in a given dimension attribute. After struggling with passing a variable to the query argument of the OPENROWSET command, I finally found the documentation that clearly stated that the query argument CAN'T be a variable. Or a concatination of a string and a variable. I still don't understand why... but the suggested workaround is to construct a giant TSQL string and run it using the EXEC command.
Ok - but how do we get the results of the query? Basically, the only way to do this is to create a temporary table in the current scope and do an INSERT INTO that temp table in your giant TSQL query. It all ends up looking something like this:
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- @scaleovenstove @jbollinger let's do it. "BItter" ;-) in reply to scaleovenstove 3 weeks ago
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