I have been notified of this strange bug in Analysis Services 2005 that is easily reproducable.
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PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS TEST ON A PRODUCTION SERVER! IT HANGS ANALYSIS SERVICES!!!
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- Open SQL Server Management Studio
- Browse the Adventure Works cube
- Put Promotions/Promotions hierarchy on the filter area (no measures in the data area)
- Expand Promotions and uncheck “Customer”
- Drag Promotions hierarchy from filter to rows
- Drill the “Reseller” member – at this point you may observe a long wait but the worst is that msmdsrv.exe process on the server (it’s the Analysis Services service) is consuming all available virtual memory – you need to restart Analysis Services service at this point
I tested it on a SP2 server.
First of all, since it is a “Denial of Service” for Analysis Service, it is best to remove the Adventure Works sample from a production server – but you never put sample databases on production server, right? :-)
I hadn’t time to test it more to understand what is the real issue here to understand what is the impact on other databases. The strange thing is that if you do not move the Promotions hierarchy on the filter area before, the problem do not arises.