Recently, while browsing a cube excel, an end-user asked me when was it last processed? I had no quick answer and so had to connect to the SSAS server in management studio and check the properties of the cube. This got me thinking on how to expose the cube’s last processed date and time to end users through Excel or similar client tools. This is very helpful to them in that they can quickly check when was the data last added. Think about it like this. A user builds a pivot table report in Excel with a filter at top which shows when was the cube processed. He then copies the pivot table data and sends to his colleague. His colleague checks the numbers and instantly knows that they are based on data from certain date. If he did not have the last processed date, the assumption can be made that the numbers are based on latest set of data which might not be true. So with that in mind, I decided to implement a simple solution to expose when the cube was last processed and here are the steps.
1. Create table in data warehouse which would have just one column storing date and time when the cube processing finished. This table will always have one record.
2. The record in the table above will be updated with latest timestamp after the cube has been processed. This can be done in the ETL.
3. Import this table in the DSV and create a dimension based on it. This dimension will have just one attribute and one member which will the the last time cube was processed. You might want to be careful with naming of this dimension. It should appear either at the top or bottom in fields list in pivot table so that it does not interfere with the analysis.
4. Set IsAggregatable property of the attribute to False. This is to remove the ‘All’ member because there’s always going to be one member in the dimension attributes,
5. Add this dimension in Dimension Usage matrix. You don’t have to worry about attaching it to any measure group.
6. Add the new dimension to the perspectives if you have any and that’s it.Deploy and process the cube.
To test, connect to the cube in Excel, drag the attribute in report filter and it should show when was the cube last processed. Here’s a little screenshot when I implemented this for Adventure Works 2012 cube. And yes, don’t forget to process the dimension while processing the SSAS database.
Filter shows when the cube was last processed
Hope that was helpful. Any suggestions are always welcome.
