Update: Please see Christophe Fiessinger’s blog post concerning Known Issues with the Infrastructure Update

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While reviewing the white paper that describes the recent Project 2007 Infrastructure Update in detail, I came upon some interesting information at the end of the document.

Before I start, I first want to thank and congratulate Microsoft on a job well done with the quality and quantity of documentation they’ve provided for this update. Compared to the sometimes-cryptic KB Articles that typically accompany hotfixes and updates, the Infrastructure Update’s documentation is outstanding.

That being said, I do have some concerns relating to the changes in Cost Resources, which are a new way in Project 2007 of accounting for costs associated with a project. Cost Resources are typically used to account for non-work costs such as travel expenses. The Infrastructure Update makes some significant changes to the way that Cost Resources function, and while I am a big fan of the idea of Cost Resources, I cannot help but be concerned by some of the caveats I’ve quoted below:

For those of you that haven’t heard yet, yesterday morning Microsoft released the long-awaited Infrastructure Update for WSS, the Office Servers (including Project Server), and Project 2007.

You can read an overview of updates here, and read detailed information in this white paper.

This update promises significant performance and stability improvements to the entire line of Office Servers, WSS, and the Project Client. If you haven’t already (or have only read the overview), I strongly recommend you read the white paper. It contains 30 pages of information about the update, and contains a lot of important information (including user scenarios to avoid).

From the overview:

Project Server

• Timesheets and My Tasks stability and usability improvements
• Queue Management user interface improvements
• Logging Tracing improvements
• Project Server performance improvements
• Project Server 2003 to Project Server 2007 migration fixes

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.