Back in April, I posted an article where I recommended that you install the latest CU for SQL 2005 (CU7).

Since then, I’ve recieved feedback regarding some issues introduced by this CU. It would appear that they are more of an issue than I originally thought. Based on this feedback, I’m going to recommend that you all stick with CU6 for the time being.

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At a previous client, I encountered an issue where, when creating or viewing certain views in Data Analysis, the Analysis Services service would spike in processor/memory utilization and become unresponsive.

I have recently discovered that this is a known issue in environments that have an interaction between Office Web Components and SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services with Service Pack 2 (which means Project Server).

Although I’m not 100% sure, I believe the KB that covers this issue is KB936251. The symptoms seem to fit.

At any rate, I have been told that the resolution was included way back in SQL Server 2005 Cumulative Update 2. I recommend that you install the current CU, which is CU7, due to the number of fixes it contains. UPDATE: I’ve recieved information that CU6 is a better choice due to some issues introduced by CU7. I’ve posted a followup article here.

Are you seeing one or more of the following Event IDs (6398, 6482, and 7076) in your event log approximately every minute? Many of our clients have seen these errors indicating insufficient storage on their MOSS/WSS/Project Server farms, but are unable to find exactly what the errors refer to. Upon investigation, they generally find that there is sufficient memory and hard disk space on all servers in the farm (including SQL Server). However, even in cases where the amount of available storage is lacking, expanding the amount of available storage does not make the errors stop.

The full errors are:

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.