There is a question on how to rename an Analysis Services 2005 cube since you cannot do that within SSMS (you can rename a database but you cannot a cube).  If you want to rename a cube prior to its deployment, you can alter it through XMLA.  To do this: <Cube …><ID>Blah</ID><Name>Foo</Name>… As you can see from above, the <Name> node can be changed so that while the ID for this cube is still "blah", now your name can be "Foo". But if you want to change the name of your cube after its already been deployed, there are an…

Thanks to Edward Melomed and Eric Jacobsen for these quick tips!   In order to view the full list of error codes and messages for SQL Server Analysis Services 2005, you can open up Visual Studio and look at the resources within the msmdsrv.rll file.  A quick and handy way to view the RLL file is to use Mark Russinovich’s Strings utility from Sysinternals – you can find it at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/Strings.mspx.  Note that this RLL file has the tracedefinition90.xml file embedded inside it.      

In the Best Practices whitepaper Analysis Services Processing Best Practices (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/ssaspbpr.mspx), I had noted in the Troubleshooting Best Practices > Create a system-wide trace file section that you could create a Analysis Services Processing Trace via XMLA.  Many thanks again to Dave Wickert for providing this example.  But I had forgot to note where one can get all of the trace event definitions from.  To do this, go to the [%Olap Data Folder%]\bin\Resources\1033 folder (by default [%Olap Data Folder%] is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\Olap) and open up the file tracedefinition90.xml.  In there, you can find all of the trace event definitions….

In reference to my blog on Distinct Count Optimization at http://denster.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!125D53A08EC75357!1156.entry, I would like to expand it slightly specifically for Analysis Services 2005.  Based on customer visits and more extensive testing, I have found that following most of the advice in my original blog entry will help improve distinct counts.   But, for Analysis Services 2005, it will be better to partition where the distinct value (e.g. users) are placed in the same partition.  This is different from Analysis Services 2000 where the partitioning strategy was to take that same distinct value and spread it across as many partitions as…