Sample Robocopy Script to customer synchronize Analysis Services databases
As a quick follow up to the SQL Server Best Practices article Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services, below is an example cmd script on how to robocopy the OLAP databases from one server to another. As a quick refresher, within this whitepaper we called out the technique of using robocopy as a method to synchronize an OLAP database between servers as a viable alternative to the Analysis Services' synchronize method. The advantages of using this approach includes the fact that you can copy the database to multiple servers in parallel and it can be faster provided that you are not blocked by the constraints noted below. A disadvantage to this approach is that it will require stopping/restarting the Analysis Services service in order for the server to recognize the OLAP database once it has been copied over. This approach is typically used within environments where there is only one AS database on the server, though it can work for multiple databases provided there are no issues with you shutting out user access to multiple databases to stop/restart the server. You can review the whitepaper linked above for more details.