Azure Analysis Service - partition to refresh modified rows only?

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I have an AS tabular model that contains a fact table with 20 mil rows. I have partitioned this so only the new rows get added to each day... however occasionally, a historical row (from years ago) will be modified. I can identify this modified row in SQL (using the last modified timestamp) however would it be possible for me to refresh the row in SSAS to reflect this change without having to refresh my entire data model? How would I achieve this?

1 Answers

First, 20 million rows is not a lot. I’m expecting that will only take 5-10 minutes to process unless your SQL queries are very inefficient or very wide. So why bother to optimize something which may be fast enough already?

If you do need to optimize it, you will first want to partition the large fact table by some date element. Since you only have 20 million rows I would suggest partitioning by year. Optimal compression will be achieved with around 8 million rows per partition. Over-partitioning (such as creating thousands of daily partitions) is counter-productive.

When a new row is added you could perform a ProcessAdd to insert just the new records to the partitions in question. However I would recommend just doing a ProcessFull on any year partitions which have any inserts, updates or deletes in SQL.

SSAS doesn’t support updating a specific row. Thus you have to follow the ProcessFull advice above.

There are several code examples including this one which may help you.

Again this may be overkill if you only have 20 million rows.

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