All of these objects are in what is called a database in Analysis Services. A
single Analysis Services database may contain any number of cubes and dimensions.
Simply deploying a project from the developer??™s machine to a server only creates
the objects, such as the dimensions and cube. It does not copy any data from the
source systems and therefore, deployment by itself does not make a cube useful to
others. After deployment, there is a step called processing. Processing a cube means
Figure 3-10 The Cube has been designed and is ready for any modifications necessary.
58 B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e w i t h M i c r o s o f t O f f i c e P e r f o r m a n c e P o i n t S e r v e r 2 0 0 7
that the cube performs a series of queries to read dimension and fact data. Data
records are transformed into a binary format for storage by Analysis Services. After
records are read and stored, aggregations and indexes are built.
The time it takes to process a cube depends on many factors, the main one being
the size of the fact tables in the star schema database. Microsoft is often considered
to have one of the fastest cube building engines on the market, but extremely large
cubes can still take hours and hours to process. Don??™t forget, too, that processing
copies data from the star schema and stores it in a new format; this means that the
data is a snapshot in time and updates to the star schema will not be reflected until
the cube is reprocessed.
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