Hello all,

I implemented a partition management system in C++ using DSO. In one of the
task types I do 6 merges in a row in a single transaction. The merges should
take about 5-10 seconds each, but as you can see from the log excerpt, at
some point after running smoothly for many hours, the merges begin to take
about 3600 seconds "too long". During the merges I hold write locks on the
target partitions. There are no concurrent accesses to the cubes. Before
executing the merge the slice values of the participating partitions are
updated and after merging the source table filter is updated. All updates
happen in the same transaction as the merges themselfs.

No errors are reported by the Analysis Service. The connection to the
Analysis Service is kept alive the whole time - it is never renewed.

The next thing I'll try out is to reconnect to the Analysis Service every
other hour or the like, just to see if it works around the problem.

2003/09/12 02:01:07 Merged Defects_AX_EY_Level_00_Id_011 into
Defects_AX_EY_Level_01_Id_027 (5758 ms)
2003/09/12 03:01:17 Merged Defects_AX_SY_Level_00_Id_011 into
Defects_AX_SY_Level_01_Id_027 (3610111 ms)
2003/09/12 03:01:27 Merged Defects_BX_EY_Level_00_Id_011 into
Defects_BX_EY_Level_01_Id_027 (10035 ms)
2003/09/12 04:01:36 Merged Defects_BX_SY_Level_00_Id_011 into
Defects_BX_SY_Level_01_Id_027 (3610091 ms)
2003/09/12 04:01:46 Merged Defects_RX_EY_Level_00_Id_011 into
Defects_RX_EY_Level_01_Id_027 (10054 ms)
2003/09/12 05:01:58 Merged Defects_RX_SY_Level_00_Id_011 into
Defects_RX_SY_Level_01_Id_027 (3612034 ms)

I am using Analysis Services 2000 SP 3 on Windows XP SP 1. Any help is very
appreciated.

Best regards, David

Update:

"Luckily" my partition manager just hang as described in my previous post.
Renewing the connection every hour obviously is no workaround.

I took the opportunity to experiment a bit. I started the Analysis Manager,
opened the Analysis Service node in the tree control, then opened "Cubes"
and right-clicked on the Cube, which contained the partitions, which were
currently merged. At that very moment the current merge operation finished
after being idle (no CPU load) for 1400 seconds.

Just to repeat: there were no other DSO-processes or MDX-clients accessing
cubes before I started the Analysis Manager. It seems that the click on the
cube prompted the Analysis Manager to communicate with the Analysis Service
in a way that "woke it up".

The next thing I'll try is to send simple MDX queries to the Analysis
Service to see if that keeps it awake.

In the meantime, if you know the cause for my problem, don't hesitate to
inform me. Thanks!

David