Blogging about all things SAS

In SAS 9.1 you can’t incrementally load a SAS OLAP Cube, the load job effectively deletes the physical cube files and recreates them.

This is a slight problem if a user is actually viewing the OLAP cubes, as they will be locked and the cube build will fail.

Michelle Wilkies (good kiwi lass by the way) describes in the SAS Support paper How to Update Cubes on an Active SAS® OLAP Server how to go about ‘disconnecting’ the user before the build, but what if the users (persistent little buggers that the are) actually want the information and so keep logging back on.

Well you have some problems.

We thought about stopping the OLAP server, but in our case we only wanted to rebuild (i.e stop access) to some cubes, not all, stop the OLAP server and users can’t access any cube.

We thought about changing security rights on each cube to bock users, but it is time consuming.

We thought about splitting the OLAP Schema’s out into multiple schema’s based on subject area, This way we could change security rights on a single schema, update all the cubes for that subject and wallah.

But the issue is SAS Portal and OLAP Viewer both give nasty errors (rather than nice user friendly ones) if the OLAP Schema is not available.

Screenshot – OLAP Viewer with no Security rights

So the Portal OLAP Viewer shows a blank view (and no the cube doesn’t have dimensions called A and B)

Portal OLAP View – No Security

The OLAP Viewer shows a lovely Java error.

So what happens if you create a second OLAP Server/Service (with two OLAP Schema’s of course) and pause one of those, well the Portal doesn’t show an error, but the OLAP Viewer still does.

OLAP Server Stopped – Portlet

Nice blank OLAP Viewer portlet

Screenshot – OLAP Viewer with OLAP Server stopped

But still an ugly Java error in the OLAP Viewer.

So bring on incremental OLAP loads in SAS 9.2 I say!