Synchronizing OLAP Cubes

Creating and Using Data Warehouses

Creating and Using Data Warehouses

Synchronizing OLAP Cubes

If you are using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services with your data warehouse to analyze and prepare OLAP data for presentation to users, you must be familiar with the effects of data changes on Analysis Services cubes before updating data in the data warehouse. In some situations, users can receive inconsistent results after data warehouse data changes until summary information is updated to incorporate new detail data.

The effects of changes in underlying data on cubes vary with the types of cubes in use. For example, multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) cubes are unaffected by changes in underlying data until the cubes are reprocessed. Depending on how they are defined, relational OLAP (ROLAP) cubes and hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) cubes may be immediately affected and require updating or reprocessing to regain consistency. Real-time cubes are designed to incorporate new data warehouse data immediately. For more information, see Analysis Services Overview and Maintaining OLAP Data.