Hi:

here are two cases for processing a cube:

(1) 4 dimensions (Country, State, County, City), each has only one level.
(2) One dimension with 4 levels (Country->State->County->City).

By my understanding, the (1) should take longer time to aggregat the cube
since it will aggregate on all posible combinations of the 4 dimensions; and
(2) only aggregate in one direction Country to City which should have less
number of aggregation compared with (1). But the AS shows that case (2)
takes longer time to process. Anyone could explan?

Thanks

Guess it is the number of records in the dimensions that
decides the processing time.

For example say each of your dimension members(Country,
State, County, City) has 2 elements, the first case will
have two records in each dimension where as the second
case will have 16 combinations in the dimension. Not sure,
though, this could be one of the reason

If you are really worried about your cube process time,
try modifying the Read-Ahead Buffer size and Process
Buffer Size in the Properties tab of your AS.