Going in Production - Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models - page 295

There are two things to point out here:

• In order to store the list of relational partitions that are covered by this

Analysis Services partition, we used an Annotation. Annotations are
string values that can be stored inside many Analysis Services objects
programmatically, and we can use them to store additional information not
covered by the standard Analysis Services properties.
In this case, we have used annotations to store both the partition type (Yearly
or Monthly) and the list of months that are stored inside the partition. For the
month names, we used a string consisting of multiple six-character groups
in the form YYYYMM. We will use these annotations when we execute the
package in order to determine which months each partition covers without
having to parse the source query.

• The QueryDefinition tag contains the SQL query that will be sent to

the relational data source (in our case SQL Server) when the partition is
processed. The query has been constructed to use the partition key in the
most effective way: each SELECT statement returns data from exactly one
partition and the results are UNION ed together.

Now, if we run the script again, moving a month forward, the script will update
the partitioning structure once again. Here's what the log of the Integration Services
package shows:

Year partition Sales of Year 2001 is already ok.
Year partition Sales of Year 2002 is already ok.
Merging partition Sales of Month 200307 into Sales of Year 2003
Partition Sales of Month 200308 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200309 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200310 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200311 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200312 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200401 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200402 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200403 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200404 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200405 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200406 is already ok.
Partition Sales of Month 200407 has been created.