Administering Analysis Services - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 560

Figure 12-8
When a cube is created you will typically do a full process ( Process Full in
process dialog) of it so that you can browse the cube. Usually the cube struc-
ture might not change after the initial design. You will be getting additional fact
data that you would want to add to an existing cube. For example, you might
have a Sales cube that you have created and you might be getting sales fact
data from each store every month. Processing the entire cube every time will
take a considerable amount of time and end users might have to wait for a
long period to see the most up to date data. Analysis Services 2005 provides
you with an option to process only the new fact data instead of the entire
cube. This is called incremental processing. In order to add the new fact data
to the cube you can add a new partition to the cube and process that parti-
tion. Alternately you can use the Process Incremental option in process dialog
and specify the query that provides the new fact data that needs to be pro-
cessed. Process incremental is a common management task for data ware-
houses. If you specify the Process Default option in process dialog, the server
checks for all the objects that have not been processed and only processes
those objects. If the cube data had been processed and if aggregations and
indexes are not processed then those are processed.