Visual Studio hangs when deploying a cube

Question

Hello All,

I'm having an issue with an Analysis Services project in Visual Studio 2005. My project always builds but only occasionally deploys. No errors are reported and VS just hangs. This is my first Analysis Services project so I am hoping that there is something obvious that I am just missing.

Here is the situation I have a cube that I have successfully deployed.

I then make some change, e.g., adding a hierarchy to a dimension. When I try to deploy again VS hangs. I have to restart Analysis Services to regain control of VS so I can shut it down. I restart everything sometimes once, sometimes twice or more before the project will eventually deploy. This happens with any change I make there seems to be no pattern to this behaviour.

Sometimes I have to delete the cube from Analysis Services before restarting everything to get a successful deploy.

Also I have successfully deployed the cube, and then subsequently successfully reprocessed a dimension then when I open a query window in SQL Server Management Studio it says that it can find any cubes.

As a test I have deployed a cube successfully. I have then deleted it in Analysis Services and attempted to redeploy it, without making any changes to the cube, only to have the same behaviour mentioned above.

VS just hangs with no reason so I have no idea where to start hunting down the problem.

It is taking 15-20 minutes to make a change as simple as setting the NameColumn of a dimension attribute. As you can imagine this is taking hours of my time so I would greatly appreciate any assistance anyone can give me.

Answer 1

How big is your project? VS2005 has some memory issues with large cubes. Can you use the Deployment Wizard instead?

Also, don't forget that you can raise support incidents for this type of behaviour (http://support.microsoft.com/).

Answer 2

A bit late :-(

Occasionally we experience the same problem. AS hangs during deploy, we have used the SQL Server Profiler and we have seen that no activity is performed. We discouvered that increasing the advanced parameter "Processing thread pool max threads" solves.

I found also this usefull link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2007/01/16/processing-appears-to-stall-or-become-sluggish-on-multi-processor-machines-running-analysis-services-2005.aspx