Analysis Services Proactive Caching Operations and Errors

One of the more interesting aspects of being involved in supporting Business Intelligence applications is the opportunity to investigate behaviors that are either unexpected or perhaps not so intuitively understood. Proactive Caching is one aspect of Analysis Services that is not well understood by some and can present some interesting issues, especially when errors related to data quality occur. A behavior that was encountered recently involved Proactive Caching entering a loop when partitions in a cube were configured for Proactive Caching using either Client Notifications or SQL Notifications and the Proactive Caching operation failed.