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When I'm viewing a measure spliced by all the members of a particular dimension, I get an error in regards to the member name's characters.

Here's how the error appears in the different clients -

SQL BI Studio:

TITLE: Microsoft Visual Studio

A list of actions for the selected items cannot be obtained because of the following error.
XML parsing failed at line 12, column 62: Illegal xml character.
.
This error may have occurred because the definition for at least one action is not valid. Verify the definition for each action using the Actions view.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

XML parsing failed at line 12, column 62: Illegal xml character.
. (Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services)

Reporting Service's VS query builder complains:
Error:
' ', hexadecimal value 0x08, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 94333. (System.Xml)

In SQL Management Studio:
When expanding the dimension's children, a message yields "Error occured

retrieving child nodes, The server sent an unrecognizable response"

3 free bugs for any SDETs out there :-)
Are there any known work arounds? What's the best way to filter out these characters (and which characters to we need to filter?)

Probably your dimension table contains invalid XML character as part of member name or key. You can go to the attribute which causes this problem and change the bindings on the NameColumn or KeyColumn (depending which one caused the problem) for InvalidXmlCharacters from the default Preserve to Remove or Replace. This will slow down processing of the attribute a little bit, but it should solve the problem.

HTH,

Mosha (http://www.mosha.com/msolap)

Autoslicing not working

I have around 36 partitions in the 2005 cube. Each partition is roughly 20M fact rows.

The partitions are differentiated by a date member dimension.

When I run a query which selects by a distinct date, SSAS tries to scan all partitions (for inclusions?). This introduces a huge performance impact. It takes many seconds to run a single query.

I have aggregations designed specifically for relevant dimensions. The Profiler shows that SSAS reads from aggregations. It does not read from facts.

The storage mode is MOLAP.

Do I need to use the partition slice property ? I am seeing on forums from time to time that this attribute is not used in MOLAP.

I just need to make sure that my queries are fast.

I don't see where it could hurt to set this property, though BOL indicates this is only used by SSAS for ROLAP partitions. I thought I had heard that with MOLOP and/or HOLAP, that SSAS maintained an internal set of information regarding the contents of a slice that would handle this function for you. Maybe someone else out there could chime in on this one.

Regarding the query you specify above, are you specifying a date member from the specific cube dimension used to partition your cube? You probably are but it wasn't explicitly stated. Date dimensions are often used in a role-playing capacity which introduces some confusion.

Thanks,
Bryan

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can anyone clarify if the Slice property on Partition is used in MOLAP or not?

I checked info....xml files for my slicing dimension min/max values and they seem correct, however with explicit queries, SSAS still reads a bunch of partitions...