Obtaining Cube Dimension Data

This post started on a technique that could be used to build an automated cube processing package. The idea was that we could simply point our code at a cube, press play and then create a highly defined package in SSIS. Some may suggest that you could simply process the entire database and cut down on the code. That approach is unworkable in larger implementations where processing windows are small and cube processing does not complete in the allocated time. I was planning a different approach whereby dimensions are processed and then desired measure groups. The first stage therefore was to define code that would list dimensions and that is the purpose of this post - return a dataset with unique dimension information. There are a few ways to do this, each has its own challenges.