Examining SSAS Write-Back - Updates and Transactions

SSAS write-back is a very under-used feature of SSAS in my view. It can be very powerful when we have a good understanding of its capabilities. A good first step is to explore how it works through some MDX.

For the purpose of this article, I am using a very simple cube, which has two dimensions and one measure. I have enabled MOLAP write-back for its only partition and I have processed it, thus creating its Write Table. I will explore what happens when we issue different transaction management and UPDATE CUBE statements in varying order.