Designin and Processing Cubes

Does anyone have any best practices for processing cubes on a prod environment? If we have 1 server which we have the production cube on, what is the best way to get the changes into the production cube. I tried a backup and restore of the AS DB with no success. Should I just create the database on a dev server and keep prod and dev separate? Any assistance would HELP BIG TIME!!!

The ultimately the question is: what configuraion you can afford to have. The better practice many Analysis Services users have found is to have 2 servers: Staging and Production. You were to maintatain your production server for users to query and during late night you'd use Sychronization feature of Analysis Services to push a new state from the Staging server. On the Staging server you process updates into your dimensions and partitions, you do your backups and test whether the data is correct, you test your security in short you make sure you get your cubes ready before user can see them.

Edward.
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Design question two companies one parent

I have built some cubes for one of two companies owned by a parent company. The execs at the parent company like what they see. They want the same thing done for the second company. They would also like to see a rolled up view of the data (sales, ytd sales by product group, material cost...).

Should I:

Build separate fact tables and cubes. If so how best to roll up the data. I would have to combine sales for identical product groups etc.

Another idea I had was to include an entity_id column in the fact tables and keep everything together.

My feeling is that the entity_id would be easy but some columns will be missing data for one of the company and other columns may be empty for the other company.

There are certainly issues with either method (security, performance, maintenance) but I would like to hear what your thoughts are.

By the way, the parent company just purchased a third company so I that company will eventually be included.

Thanks,

Chris

This is not an SSAS2005 issue but since I cannot find a data warehouse modeling group I can give you some general advice:

Have a look here: http://www.kimballgroup.com/ for design issues. Most of the content is free and of good quality.

A company dimension is recommended. Be careful, though, with internal sales, between the companies in the group, and how this is handled.

Normally the parent company would like a consolidated view of their business and this means, at least, common dimensions and common fact tables.

Kind Regards

Thomas Ivarsson

Design Aggregation Problem

I have some problem. design aggregation cannot be made on several cubes that have a lot of data, and

have a lot of measures and dimension (the number of fields in the table more or

less 150 fields). They return 0% optimization level when we run design

aggregation.

This link have been published a few posts down but I repeat it here again. This is a good guide of how to create good aggregations: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!907.entry

HTH

Thomas Ivarsson