stevienova.com

Crazy error today. In Analysis Services, (SSAS), some jobs got hung, sync command got hung, and what ended up happening is a cube on the default instance was totally unusable.
Try to delete, rename, resync, redeploy, anything, and I would get the error..
Errors in the metadata manager. The dimension with ID of..
Couldn’t do anything. [...]

Running a SQL Agent job to do an ETL/Cube Processing, you might also want to check the status of the cube after you process it, just to make sure.
Create a job step that is a T-SQL type, and

DECLARE @forecast VARCHAR(10)
    SELECT  @forecast = CAST("[Measures].[Forecast-Part]" AS VARCHAR(10))         FROM     [...]

This weekend, I ran across this on CodePlex – OLAP PivotTable Extensions which got me thinking back to a post by the Excel blog about adding calculated measures and named sets in VBA (which is another blog post completely)
From CodePlex:
OLAP PivotTable Extensions is an Excel 2007 add-in which extends the functionality of PivotTables on Analysis [...]

One feature of Excel 2007 that I think is really cool, and also a little hidden, is the “Offline OLAP” feature.
If you insert a pivot table connected to an OLAP cube into Excel 2007, and go to the PivotTable Options Ribbon Menu, You will see the “OLAP Tools” Button. Click on that and then “Offline [...]