Analysis Services 2005 Processing Log

Analysis Services 2000 had a "processing log" that all processing activities could be logged to. Is there a similar capability in Analysis Services 2005? How do I enable it?

Thanks!

Keith Spitz, Software Engineer, Wall Street On Demand

I am not aware of an identical capacity in SSAS 2005, but there are a couple of options that would get you similar information.

If you want to capture errors there is an error log setting that you can use, but I know the processing log in AS 2000 used to capture a lot more information than just errors.|||You can define ErrorConfiguration object, which contains the path to the processing log or define ErrorConfiguration element if you are processing from DDL script. If you are processing from UI (Management Studio or BI Dev Studio), on processing dialog click on Change Settings and go to the Dimension(Partition) key error tab. Or in SSMS right click on the object, dimension for example, and choose properties->Select a page: Error Configuration.|||

Where is the error log setting described above and in the MSDN docs?

Error Log

ErrorLog\ ErrorLogFileName

I don't see this in my Analysis Services Properties with the Advanced box checked. I'm hoping to get processing errors logged to a consistent location. I'm on SP2.

Thanks, David

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Where is the error log setting described above and in the MSDN docs?

Error Log

ErrorLog\ ErrorLogFileName

I don't see this in my Analysis Services Properties with the Advanced box checked. I'm hoping to get processing errors logged to a consistent location. I'm on SP2.

Thanks, David

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I have SP2 and I can't see this setting either, I can't remember if it was there previously. You can set this setting at a number of different levels and in the processing command itself. I don't know if setting it at the server level changes the default or if the server setting is used to seed new objects.

You can edit the server setting by editing the settings file, the properties window is basically showing you the settings from msmdsrv.ini which you can find at:

<Program Files>\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.<x>\OLAP\Config

You can see these settings in there. This is just an xml file (inspite of it's .ini extension) - you should take a backup of this file if you do edit it, as if you make a mistake you may not be able to start the SSAS server.

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> you should take a backup of this file if you do edit it, as if you make a mistake you may not be able to start the SSAS server

Actually, you would see that AS automatically backs up the last good known version of config file in the form of msmdsrv.bak file, so if something goes wrong with .ini, it has something to fall on. But taking backups is always a good idea - one can never trust software...

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So what happened to all those error handling settings at server level ? Why have they gone from SQL Management Studio ? I got the same problem. Now after migrating to SP2 I see in my msdmsrv.ini that I have KeyErrors set on with fail on first error. However, my cubes don't behave that way during processing after migrating to SP2 - processing just continues after the first error, when it should not. This is a change in behaviour that seemed to happen with installation of SP2. Is anyone else experiencing this ? Any solution ?

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The change here appears to be in the DISCOVER_XML_METADATA command which is no longer returning these properties - not sure why.

However these properties can be overridden at the object level and again in the actual processing command. So if you always want your cube/dimension etc to process with a particular error configuration you can set this up in BI Development Studio on the object(s) in question. You should also double check the object(s) and whatever is sending the processing command to make sure that they are not overriding the error configuration.

That said the default was (and rightly so in my opinion) to stop on the first error and it's a bit disturbing that anything would change this.

You are not by any chance working in a team where someone else may have altered these settings on the object(s) in question are you? I had this happen to me once and took me ages to figure out why the cube and fact table did not reconcile.