Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Assume SSN is the Key attribute for this dimension and by default all attrib-
utes within the dimension are member properties of the key attribute. In addi-
tion, assume additional member property relationships have been estab-
lished. They are Country State, State City, City Customer Name, State
Customer Name, and Country Customer Name. Due to the preceding rela-
tionship, the order of processing of the attributes in the Customer dimension
is Country, State, City, Customer Name, and SSN. This is because Analysis
Services needs to have information about Country in order to establish the
member property relationship while processing the State, Customer Name, or
SSN.
When the
Process Default
option is chosen for processing, the dimension's
data or indexes are processed if they had not been processed. If the
Process
Full
option is chosen, the entire dimension is re-processed. When
Process
Full
option is used dimension data and indexes that have been processed ini-
tially will be dropped and data is retrieved from the data source. Based on di-
mension size (number of dimension members as well as number of attributes
and hierarchies in the dimension) the processing operation can take a long
time.
Similar to incremental processing of the cubes you can incrementally process
dimensions using the
Process Update
option. The
Process Update
option in
the process dialog maps to
ProcessUpdate
process type in the process com-
mand which is applied only for dimensions. Some of the dimensions such as
Employees or Customers or Products can potentially contain a large number
of members. Mostly additional members can be added to these dimension or
some attributes of these dimension members might have changed. Often a
full processing of the entire dimensions is not only necessary, but cannot be
afforded due to business needs. Under these circumstances incremental pro-
cessing of the dimension or an update of the attributes of the dimension
should be sufficient. When you choose the
Process Update
option for the di-
mension, the server scans all the dimensions in the dimension table. If there
were changes to the dimension caption or description, they are updated. If
new members are added to the dimension table, these members are added
to the existing dimension during incremental processing. When the
Process
Update
option is chosen, attributes of each dimension member will be up-
dated. The key of each dimension member is assumed to be the same, but
expect some attributes to be updated. The most important attribute that is up-
dated is the member property for each member. When you have a parent-
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