Question

I have a situation where I 3 partitions in SSAS BIDS 2008 for different years. I need to know which partition is in use in current context and why? How to change it manually?

For example, I have to partitions: P2001, P2002 and P2001-2002; user queries for sales in 2002.
In this case, what partition comes in play and why only that? How can I change this. I want to use P2001 when user queries for sales in 2002 (It makes no sense logically but will clarify my doubts)

I hope I made sense in elaborating my idea?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

First of all, your partitions should not have overlapping data. It will read the overlapping data twice (or the number of partitions this data is on). You do not control which partition is being read, SSAS knows which partition each key is on, so it will just read that partition when running a query.

You can use the SQL Server Profiler to look at the queries being run to see which partitions are being read, here is an example from the web:

In order to be able to query without any cached data (to make sure to see which partitions are being read), you can run this XMLA to clear the cache for your cube then run your queries again:

<Batch xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine">
   <ClearCache>
      <Object>
         <DatabaseID> database id </DatabaseID>
         <CubeID> cube id </CubeID>
      </Object>
   </ClearCache>
</Batch>