At my present client, prior to the release of Project Server 2007 SP1, we obtained and deployed the hotfix rollup described in KB939594 to resolve some of the issues present in the product prior to the release of SP1.

Unfortunately, after deployment of this hotfix we discovered that when building the cube it would take significantly longer than RTM to build. Specifically:

• Cubes built with earliest start and latest finish would take an hour and a half or more to build
• Cubes built with a timeframe of 36 months forward and 13 months back 7+ hours to build and would cause the TempDB to get HUGE (in excess of 200GB)

When running the Cube Build without a date range, the cube would build in an hour or two — but as soon as you introduced a date range, the cube build would jump to 7+ hours, if it was even successful at all. More often than not, however, it would simply grow the TempDB to around 250GB, filling up the disks that the SQL databases were stored on and fail.

When building a cube for the first time,  a deployer will sometimes see an error similar to the following error message in the Cube Status screen:

Failed to build the OLAP cubes. Error: Analysis Services session failed with the following error: Failed to delete the Olap database: PWA_AnalysisServices. Error: Your permissions on the server computer do not allow you to administer this Analysis server. Error:

Typically, this error is caused by failing to correctly or completely follow the directions outlined in this article on configuring Analysis Services 2005 to work with Project Server 2007. It can also caused by not restarting Analysis Services after you give the SSP account administrative permissions to Analysis Services — this does not appear in the aforementioned article, but it is sometimes required.