Crash, Bang, WOLAP..

I’ve been working on a SQL Server 2008 project that uses proactive caching on some partitions to speed up the availability of the data to the end user.

For all the things that have been said and written about ROLAP in the past apart from some issues around traces I’ve found it to behave itself pretty much. Well that is until now.

Since moving into a test environment we’ve been getting a lot these errors;

The description for Event ID 22 from source MSSQLServerOLAPService cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer. If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event. The following information was included with the event: Internal error: An unexpected exception occurred. the message resource is present but the message is not found in the string/message table

Actually these errors would come thick and fast every couple of seconds or so until the Analysis Services service decided to stop. Profiling the Analysis Server showed the problem from the OLAP server point of view where it seemed to happen when the aggregations were being merged.;

Internal error: An unexpected exception occurred. Errors in the OLAP storage engine: An error occurred while processing the 'Current Day' partition of the 'Fact Table' measure group for the 'AS2008 Bug Test' cube from the AS2008 Bug Test database. Server: The operation has been cancelled.

I took the OLAP database that I was using and broke it down until I had the minimum amount of code and objects left in there. This meant stripping out the calculations, all of the measure groups, apart from 1, and most of the dimensions. Finally I was left with a cube that had 2 dimensions (one of which was a date dimension) and a single measure.

Within the measure group were 2 partitions, one was standard MOLAP the other a real-time HOLAP partition looking at the same fact table but different date ranges (current day and everything else). Now here’s the thing, while there is data in the HOLAP partition there are no errors and no crashing. With the HOLAP partition not processed, again no errors but as soon as the HOLAP partition was processed and had no data to retrieve then there would be errors galore resulting in the inevitable crash.

A further step back showed that this would all behave as long no aggregations were applied to the HOLAP partition. As soon as a single aggregation was put on the partition and the partition processed the errors would appear until either data was inserted into the source table, to subsequently be picked up in the HOLAP partition, or Analysis Services crashed.

Curiously converting the partition to real-time ROLAP didn’t deliver any errors with or without aggregations and same is true for any of the MOLAP types of storage but as soon as it moved back to HOLAP the errors returned.

Some extra detail. I’ve observed this on both 32bit and 64bit systems. The 64bit server this was first spotted on has the cumulative update package 3 for SQL Server 2008 installed and the 32bit is RTM so it looks like the issue is throughout the codebase. We haven’t gone as far as to install the SP1 CTP due to environment constraints. This looks like it might be a bit of a bug so I’m in the process now of packaging up something to send to Microsoft.