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.

Chris Fiessinger recently posted a list of links to the post-SP1 hotfixes here.

For your benefit, I’ve copied them here:

• Project Server 2007 – KB 941426
• Project 2007 – KB 941657
• SharePoint Server 2007 – KB 941274
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – KB 941422

These hotfixes take advantage of Microsoft’s new Hotfix Request offering… Each KB article for a hotfix has a link whereby you can submit an email request for the hotfix. Microsoft will respond with links to the hotfix. This should save you from having to call PSS every time you need a hotfix. However, if you choose to use these hotfixes, please remember that they have not been fully tested and you may experience some unexpected behavior.

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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.