Weird failure during ProcessAdd command.

Today’s short blog is about yet another SSAS error message which do not tell you anything.

During implementation of the incremental processing of the fact data I faced a weird issue. I implemented into my workflow execution of ProcessAdd command after each incremental ETL run. But sometimes I got following error:

“An unexpected exception occurred. The current operation was cancelled because another operation in the transaction failed.”

Solution

When I analyzed this issue I could not find any detail even in SQL Profiler. Luckily, I identified a pattern when such an error occurs. The problem is following. When you do ProcessAdd, you have to provide some data as an input. If you provide an “empty dataset” the command will fail which was my case. Sometimes my ETL did not extracted any new row and therefore there were no rows coming into ProcessAdd command. After figuring this out, the solution was simple. Add a condition to my processing workflow to check whether there are some new data before issuing ProcessAdd XMLA command. The output error message is weird and does not provide you any meaningful information. So if you encounter this error, it might have the same reason.