How to troubleshoot drillthrough error in Excel 2007 -> SSAS 2008

Question

I've created a cube in SSAS 2008, and have it deployed to my local server. I can connect to the cube via Excel 2007, and the pivot table and pivot chart work perfectly. When I try to drillthrough on a cell to see the detail rows, I get the following error:

"The query did not run, or the database table could not be opened.

Check the database server or contact your database administrator. Make sure the external database is available and hasn't been moved or reorganised, then try the operation again."

I'm administrator on my local machine, I can do the drillthrough OK in Visual Studio in the designer, but Excel fails with the above error. I get the same error whether I'm double-clicking to drillthrough, or when I create a custom drillthrough action and try to use that.

Anyone else experienced this problem and know the fix?

Answer 1

OK, discovered the problem.

It's a problem relating to the locale. You seem to have two choices, you can set the machine locale to US English for Non-Unicode programs, which doesn't seem feasible for deployments, or (Better) you can edit the Excel connection to Analysis Services, and add "Locale Identifier=1033" at the end of the connection string.

Looks pretty similar to this, from 2005: http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/127113/error-when-creating-an-excel-pivot-table-from-a-ssas-project

Answer 2

Did this actually work? It's the only answer that i seem to find for this problem and i think i've tried it already and it didn't help in my case.