Managing Multidimensional Data

Obviously, the transaction-oriented business does not stop once a cube has been created. So far we have discussed the cubes as if they were read-only snapshot views of transactional data. Although it is true that OLAP databases are used to perform analysis on historical transactional data, those cubes need to be updated as the underlying transactional data changes.

Analysis Services provides three primary mechanisms for updating the multidimensional data within your cubes:

  • Processing the cube

  • Merging partitions

  • Client write back

The following sections will discuss these topics.

Processing the Cube

As mentioned earlier, in order for a cube to be populated with actual data, it must be processed. Likewise, in order to ...

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