Improving cube processing time

As your SSAS cube gets bigger, cube processing time will become a problem. This is especially true as more and more companies want cube processing during the day instead of the usual off-hours time when no one is using the cube. Partitioning the cube can help to reduce the processing time. So can using a different processing strategy than a Process Full.

The biggest benefit of partitioning is that it allows you to process multiple partitions in parallel on a server that has multiple processors. This can greatly reduce the total cube processing time. Note that partitioning requires the enterprise version of SQL Server 2008 (view version differences).