ssas dimension processing incremental

Question

I am having a large dimension and it is taking me more and more time to process it. I would like to decrease the processing time as much as possible

there is literally hundreds of different articles on how to process ssas objects as efficient and fast as possible. There are lots of tips and tricks that one can apply to speed up dimensions and cube processing. I managed to apply all or at least a big majority of them and I am still not happy with the result,.

I have a large dimension built on top of a table. It has around 60 mil records and it keeps on growing fast. It either add new rows to it or delete the existing ones. there are no updates possible

I am looking for a solution that will allow me to perform an incremental processing of my dimension. I know that the data in the previous month will not be changed. I would like to do smth similar to partitioning of my cube but on the dimension. I am using SLQ SERVER 2012 and to my knowledge dimension partitioning is not supported.

I am currently using process update on my dimension - I tried processing using by attribute and by table but both render almost the same result. I have hierarchies and relationships - some set to rigid. I am only using those attributes that are truly needed etc etc etc

process update has to read all the records in a dimension even those that i know have not changed. is there a way to partition a dimension? if I could tell SSAS to only process the last 3-4 weeks of data in my dimension and not touch the rest - it would greatly speed up my processing time.

I would appreciate your help

What exactly is this dimension about? It sounds suspiciously like a fact mistakenly designed as a dimension. The speed of growth, and the fact that you can partition it by time both suggest that it's really a fact table in disguise. I could be wrong (more details needed). — SebTHU
It is a dimension. It holds data about inventory including serial numbers; pallet numbers; batch numbers etc etc. It takes more and more time to processes every week as there is a lot of data added daily. Incremental dimension processing, if existed, would solve my problem :) — Kris
I get it. That's a difficult thing to model. I was thinking about this article - kimballgroup.com/2011/11/… - which recommends modelling inventory entities as accumulating snapshot facts. But that kind of redesign may not be feasible in your situation. — SebTHU

Kris Kris · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-12T13:31:40

ok so I did a bit of research and I can confirm that incremental dimension processing is not supported. it is possible to do process add on a dimension but if you have records that got deleted or updated you cannot do that

it would be a useful thing to have but MS hasn't developed it and I don't think it will

incremental processing of any table is however possible in tabular cubes so if you have a similar requirement and your cube is not too complex then creating a tabular cube is the way to go

ssas dimension processing incremental

1 Answers