Server Architecture and Command Execution - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services - page 485

<Object>object_reference</Object>
<Bindings>ool_bindings</Bindings>
<DataSource>ool_ds</DataSource>
<DataSourceView>ool_dsv</DataSourceView>
<ErrorConfiguration>error_config</ErrorConfiguration>
<WriteBackTableCreation>wb_tbl_creation</WriteBackTableCreation>
</Process>

You can use the elements shown in Table 26.1 when you define the Process command.

Analysis Services supports different types of processing with the Process command, which
enables you to load different data structures of Analysis Services. Table 26.2 shows the
types of properties supported in this version of Analysis Services.

In many cases, processing of data depends on how the physical data model is imple-
mented and which kind of data is loaded. We discussed how Analysis Services performs
processing in Chapter 21.

Analysis Services tracks version information for both the metadata and data of a major
object. When it executes the Process command, Analysis Services increments the version
information for the data stored in the partition. This change can affect not only the
current object, but also other objects that depend on it. To analyze the dependencies of
other objects on the object currently been processed, you can use impact analysis, a
feature that we discuss later in this chapter.

Commands That Control Transactions

There are many scenarios in which requests coming from a client application should be
grouped together, and changes made by individual commands be committed only if the
changes of all the other commands in a group are committed. For example, suppose that
you need to change the structure of a cube, process it after the change, and make the
changes to the cube permanent only if the processing succeeds.

In the database field, a series of operations that should execute together must be either
entirely completed or aborted is called a transaction. To enable transaction support,
Analysis Services provides the BeginTransaction , CommitTransaction , and
RollbackTransaction commands. You can deduce the purposes of these commands by
their names:

. BeginTransaction begins a transaction on the server.

. CommitTransaction persists all the changes done to server objects by the commands

running inside the transaction.

. RollbackTransaction discards all changes done to the objects so that they remain in

the same state they were in before the transaction started.