The 4.2 billion tuples limitation
In the What Are Cubes Bad At post, I mentioned about SSAS 4.2 billion tuples limitation. The fact that moving the attributes about solves the problem really amazed me so I’ll detail it out a little bit.
When we run a complex MDX query, sometimes SSAS returns the following error message:
The expression contains a function that cannot operate on a set with more than 4,294,967,296 tuples.
This error is consistent, i.e. it always happens every time we run that MDX query. It does not matter where we are running the query from, SSMS, BIDS, ProClarity, or MDX Studio, it always returns the same error message.