When I process a cube in AS, the process works fine until it gets to
processing the fact table, where it spends 17 minutes processing a cube that
has only 500,000 rows. It appears to be doing a lot of writes to the
tempdb.mdf on the server while it is "initializing the partition" and
processing the partition, anybody know what it is doing in tempdb and why it
is taking so long. The server is 3 proc Xeom, 2Gb Ram, RAID 5, latest
service packs.

Start time: 3:33:23 PM End time: 3:50:38 PM Duration: 0:17:15 Rows
processed: 546534

TIA,
Scott

My guess is that you haven't ran the Optimize Schema tool (part of the cube
wizard).
If you haven't done this then the SQL query that Analysis Services generates
can be complex and can result in heavy tempdb usage. See the Analysis
Services Performance Guide.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro.../ansvcspg.mspx
and search for the words "Optimize Schema".

Lastly, I strongly recommend that you turn on the system-wide processing log
file. This can greatly aid in your debugging of this kind of issue since it
will show you the SQL statement that Analysis Services issues. See the
Analysis Services Operations Guide
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro.../anservog.mspx
and search for "Processing Log File".

Hope this helps.

--
Dave Wickert [MS]
dwickert (AT) online (DOT) microsoft.com
Program Manager
BI Practices Team
SQL BI Product Unit (Analysis Services)
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.


"Scott Riehl" <scott_riehl (AT) remove (DOT) b-f.com> wrote