SSAS - Options for Cube and Dimension processing

Options available for processing cube and dimensions are almost same. Cube is having couple of more options than dimension.

Cube

There are 7 different types of options are available for cube processing.

Process Full – Server checks the storage mode and if the mode is MOLAP, server reads the from the relational data and store it in a compact format. If there were aggregations defined for the cube, the server will build those aggregations during these processing. Finally the server creates indexs for the data that helps the speed access to data during querying.

Process default – Server checks all the objects and process only those that have not been processed if the cube data has been processed and if aggregations and indexes are not processed, then those are processed.

Process incremental- Process only new fact data
Unprocess – it will clear all the data in the cube that we have processed already.
Process structure – Process all the cube dimensions and the cube definitions and not the data.
Process index – Process the aggregations and index alone.
Process data – Read the data from relational tables and store in compact mode.

Dimension

 

There are 5 different options are available for dimension processing.

• Process full
• Process update
• Process data
• Process index
• Unprocess

There is one interesting dimension property (Lazy aggregations ) which allows to build the index for new attributes of the dimension as a lazy operation in the back ground thread.