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ssasolap-cube

SSAS Cube reprocessing fails - then succeeds if I try again


So I'm basically brand new to the concept of BI, and I've inherited an existing ETL process that is a two step process:

  1. Loads the data into a database that is only used by the cube processing

  2. Starts off the SSAS cube processing against said database

It seems pretty well isolated, but occasionally (once a week, sometimes twice) it will fail with the following exception:

"Errors in the OLAP storage engine: The attribute key cannot be found"

Now the interesting thing is that:

  1. The dimension having the issue is not usually the same one (i.e. there's no single dimension that consistently has this failure)

  2. The source table, when I inspect it, does actually contain the attribute key that it says could not be found

  3. If I then immediately reprocess the dimensions and cubes manually through SSMS, they reprocess successfully and without incident.

In both the aforementioned job and when I reprocess them through SSMS, I am using "ProcessFull", so it should be reprocessing them completely.

Has anyone run into such an issue? I'm scratching my head about it... because if it was a genuine data integrity issue, reprocessing the cube again wouldn't fix it. What on earth could be happening? I've been tasked with finding out why this happens, but I can neither reproduce it consistently nor can I point to a data integrity problem as the root cause.

Thanks for any input you can provide!


Solution

  • I ran into a simular issue and i found that processing the dimentions before processing the cube worked for me.