ASO Dimension Deletion Limit

Did you know there is a maximum number of times you can add and delete dimensions in an ASO cube? Neither did I until recently. I have a Essbase Studio model the was deleting the dimensions from my cube before rebuilding them. This was necessary because I have a number of shared rollups that can move around and the best way to deal with this is to rebuild the dimension.I t was working fine until one day it gave me error messages about not being able to add a particular dimension. I removed it from my build and the next dimension popped up with the error. After investigation, I found the error “1060190 Cannot Add Dimension – too many dimensions have been created and deleted”. It turns out the maximum number of dimensions you can have is 255 (or add and delete). Each dimension added is tagged with a dimension ID that increments. Once you reach that limit you are in trouble.

As a work-around, one solution is to create a “dummy” model. Using Studio, create an application from the same Essbase Model as your regular app but instead of deleting members first, select to delete and restore database. This will give you a fresh copy of the outline. Then stop your production application and copy the outline from your dummy cube over the production one. Since it was built from the same model, we can assume the dimensionality and members are the same. Starting the app should activate the new outline and you should be set to go. A couple of things to realize

1. There is no MaxL function to copy the outline, I do this through the file system in my batch file using copy commands

2. You should always backup the original outline and data prior to doing this. Remember even if you did the deploy directly into the production app, if members are dropped you lose the data. Safety first!

3. As always Test, Test, Test. Don’t take my word on it, make sure you don’t blow up your production application by listening to me or anyone else. Two particular areas to check out are Security and drill-through reports (in addition to data integrity)

4. While you should be able to get around this issue by not specifying delete all members, and just doing an incremental rebuild on the specific dimensions, I encountered problems doing it, thus I went the delete members first route.

5. Associated with #4 *nix systems have some issues with the deploy command causing issues.

 

A second solution would be to export the data (now that you can in 11) delete and rebuild the outline then import the data and re-agg.

Someone asked me if this is also the case for BSO cubes and I can’t say that I know. I’ve never encountered the issue on a BSO cube, but then again, I have not used the Studio Delete members first as much on a BSO cube.