Setting up a new Analysis Services project
The first step towards creating a new cube is to create a new Analysis Services project in BIDS. Immediately after doing this, we strongly recommend putting your new project into source control. It's easy to forget to do this, or not bother, because building a cube doesn't seem like a traditional development project, but you'll be glad that you did it when you receive your first request to rollback a change to a complex MDX calculation.
As you're probably aware, there are two ways of working with Analysis Services projects in BIDS:
- Project mode: where you work with a local Visual Studio project and deploy to your Analysis Services server only when you're happy with all the changes you've made
- Online mode: where you edit your Analysis Services database live on the server and commit changes every time you click on the Save button
You'll only be able to use source control software effectively if you work in the project mode. Therefore, it's a good idea to resist the temptation to work in online mode unless you're only making temporary changes to your cube, even though online mode often seems to be the most convenient way of working.
With all new Analysis Services projects, there are a few useful project properties that can be set. You can set project properties by right-clicking on the Project node in the Solution Explorer pane and selecting Properties.
Here is a list of properties you may want to change:
- Build
- Deployment Server Edition: If you plan to deploy Standard Edition in production, but you're using Developer Edition in development, you will want to set this property to Standard. This will make BIDS raise errors when you build a project if you accidentally use features that aren't available in the Standard Edition.
- Deployment
- Processing Option: This property allows you to process your database automatically whenever you deploy a project. The 'Default' option will perform a Process Default, but in many cases, when you deploy a change that doesn't need any cube processing at all, a Process Default can still waste 10 or 20 seconds, and if you've made more substantial changes to an object you will still want to control when processing takes place. Setting this property to Do Not Process instead will stop all automatic processing. This means that you have to remember to manually process any objects yourself if you make changes to them but it will save you time in the long run by preventing a lot of unintentional processing.
- Server: This contains the name of the server you're deploying to and defaults to
localhost. If you're not developing on a local Analysis Services instance, then you'll need to change this anyway. Even if you are, it's a good idea to enter the name of the target server, rather than uselocalhost, in case anyone wants to work on the project on another machine. - Database: This contains the name of the database that you're deploying to. It defaults to the name of the Visual Studio project. Of course, you can change it if you want your project and database to have different names.
We'll be looking again at how Visual Studio project configurations can help you when you need to deploy your project to your production environment in Chapter 10.
Note
It is good to install BIDS Helper, an award-winning free community-developed tool that adds a lot of useful functionality to BIDS. You can download it from http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper. We'll be referring to some of its features later on in this chapter.
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