Dimension Processing Task

Processing SSAS Cubes with SSIS –Q & A

/ Mitchell Pearson / Leave a comment

For those of you who attended my webinar on Processing SSAS cubes with SSIS, thank you! For those of you who didn’t the video is still available here: http://pragmaticworks.com/Training/FreeTraining/ViewWebinar/WebinarID/1714.

Below are a few of the questions I received in the webinar. There will be a couple of follow up blogs for the more detailed questions.

Q: Can you please share the script used to generate the partitions?

A: I will post a follow up blog in the next couple of days with step by step instructions. Sharing my exact script would not be helpful. I will update this post with the additional blog.

Q: How are you stopping through your SSIS Steps within package execution?

A: Breakpoints! I used breakpoints to pause the package during execution so I could explain exactly what was going on. To enable breakpoints on a task inside SSIS you simply right click on the task and then select edit breakpoints. I showed this at the end of the webinar during Q&A.

Q: What are our best logging options if we do all of our cube processing with script tasks instead of the native components?

A: Your best logging options are going to be setting up a Profiler Trace or Extended events. I briefly explained setting up a trace at the end of my webinar.

Q: Does the C# script task need the connection string information to query SSAS for the partition information?

A: Yes. In my webinar I showed how to dynamically create partitions for your cube inside of SSIS. Before creating them I used a script task to see if the partition already existed. I have posted a follow up blog below:

https://mitchellsql.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/does-cube-partition-exists-script-task-in-ssis-explained/

Q: How are the aggregation designs handled on the dynamic partitions?

A: This is handled in the XMLA by specifying the Aggregation ID. I showed this at the end of my webinar during the Q&A section and I will also include this in a follow up blog on creating the XMLA for dynamic partitions.

Q: Is this applicable to tabular cube processing?

A: Yes. The analysis services processing task processes tabular models, cubes, dimensions, and mining models.

Once again thank you for attending our free webinar. Until next time!

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Quickly remove invalid XML characters! (Dimension Processing Error: Illegal XML Character)

/ Mitchell Pearson / Leave a comment

Recently I was using the Dimension Processing task inside of SSIS to perform a process add to one of my dimensions. I then found out that I had some bad data, more specifically, I had some invalid XML characters in my source data and this was causing the dimension processing task to fail. Below is a screenshot that includes the invalid character, after Mitchell before =.

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Error Message:

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Business Problem:

I needed to remove invalid XML characters from source data so that I could use the dimension processing task to perform a process add on the dimension.

Solution:

Sadly, I originally began this process by trying to write my own script transform to remove the invalid XML characters. Unfortunately the script I was using (Found on the internet) apparently did not account for all characters as my processing task continued to fail with the same error.

So what did I do? I turned to Task Factory of course! To solve this problem I used the Task Factory replace unwanted characters transform.

Walkthrough:

    1. Bring the Task Factory Replace Unwanted Characters Transform into your data flow and place it between your source and destination:
    2. image
    3. Next open up the Task Factory component and you will see a list of your columns on the left.
    4. On the right you will see the column “Choose Action”. Click this drop down menu for the column you wish to cleanse. This menu will provide you with 4 different cleansing actions! (List below)
      1. image
    5. Select “Replace invalid characters that cannot be part of an XML Document.

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Conclusion:

Now when I execute my package you will notice the illegal XML character is gone!

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Thank you Task Factory Team!