Administering and Monitoring Analysis Services - SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Cube Development - page 296

Synchronizing databases
Analysis Services database synchronization is a very useful feature that allows the
database administrator to copy database files from the source to target SSAS in-
stance. Synchronization is always incremental; it only copies the files that are different
on the source instance as compared to the same files on the target instance. This en-
ables the administrator to ensure that the source and target instance have the same
data with minimal effort. Because synchronization is incremental, it could be much
faster than collecting the backup and restoring the full database to the target instance.
Synchronization always works in the pull mode—the command is executed on the
target instance. Synchronization is also single threaded, which means that it only cop-
ies one file at a time and there is no way to force copying multiple files in parallel. This
normally isn't an issue for dimension files because these tend to be relatively small.
However, partition data and aggregation files can get quite large and copying only one
file at a time could be prohibitively slow. You can synchronize an existing database
or synchronize to an instance that currently does not have the database; in this case,
SSAS will have to copy every file to the target.
How to do it...
To synchronize a database, perform the following steps:
1. Connect to the target instance using SSMS, right-click on the Databases
folder, and choose Synchronize . Skip the Welcome screen.
2. Specify the source SSAS instance and the database you wish to copy. The
same screen allows you to choose the destination (target) data folder. Unless
your data drive is out of disk space and you must choose an alternate location,
use the default values and click on Next .
3. Review the list of partitions on the next screen to get an idea of how much
data will need to be copied.
4. The screen that follows allows you to choose whether data should be com-
pressed during synchronization; this is the default and recommended option.
Additionally, you can choose to copy all security settings, ignore security, or
transfer only the security roles without including the role members. Much like
the case when restoring the database, security options are useful when trans-
ferring data from production to QA or test environments.