Let Chris Webb, book author and a world-renowned expert on SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) introduce you to the world of practical cube design with this short, 5-minute video, which demonstrates how to use the SSAS Deployment Wizard. Log-in or get a free account to watch it!
The easiest way to deploy your work to the server is to use the Deploy option in Visual Studio that comes with SQL Server Data Tools BI. However this method has a number of drawbacks when you want to make a deployment into a production environment. For example, your production database may contain partitions or roles that are not in your project, and connection strings and other configuration properties may be different too. Using the SSAS Deployment Wizard is a much safer option because it allows you to only deploy the parts of your project that you want to deploy, as well as giving you the option to create a deployment script and create a fully automated deployment process—see Chris demo this in the video.
If you would like to learn more about design, building, and the deployment of multidimensional cubes, make sure to watch the remaining videos in this series, starting with Chris’s Introduction to SSDT-BI, then follow the in-depth modules on MDX.
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Comments
ihafidh · 26 September 2016
That’s great that the deployment wizard can retain partitions and roles. However, what if 2 or more developers are working on the same project; can the deployment wizard prevent overwriting of the developers’ changes? In other words, can you selectively choose what to deploy?
I have used RedGate’s “SSAS Compare” and this seems to function similar to it but only in terms of partitions and roles. RedGate has stopped developing SSAS Compare and it’s a shame since it was quite promising.
Chris Webb · 26 September 2016
No, it's not feasible to do selective deployments - I've tried it and it can lead to disaster! For SSAS Multidimensional my advice is that only one developer should work on a project at a time. There are too many dependencies between objects for multi-developer scenarios to work.