New Analysis Services database version with minimal downtime
It can be operationally challenging to deploy a new AS database version without cube downtime. Typically, if you deploy a new version of an AS database, the database will be offline until the database has completed a full process. This might be a long time in an environment where the large measure groups are very large and are only incrementally processed (on a daily, hourly, minute etc. schedule), since the full process may take many hours. This can be a problem in SQL Server OLAP as we have been operationally used to a cube being available 24 by 7, since SQL Server 7.0.
One workaround is to deploy a new version of the database with a slightly different name, for example the existing database might be Perfmon and the new version might be Perfmon_V2. In this way, the new database can be deployed and processing while the existing database is online and available. The trick comes when the new database has completed processing.
Tags: management