Incremental Processing in Tabular Using Process Add

In Analysis Services 2012 you can process a table in a Tabular model by several ways: you can process the whole table, you can split the table in several partitions and process a single partition, you can merge partitions and you can incrementally process a single partition by using ProcessAdd, which is the topic of this article.

The ProcessAdd command allows you to add only a few rows to an existing partition and to do that you have to specify the query that reads data from the data source, applying the necessary WHERE condition in a SQL query or by using any other SQL statement to this purpose. The ProcessAdd command available in Process Partition(s) dialog box in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) does not allow you to specify a custom query for the process operation, in order to filter only new rows that have to be added to the partition. However, this is not a big issue: in fact, if you need to use ProcessAdd, probably you need to automate that command in a batch process. Thus, a programmatic approach is required. A XMLA script command is required and you will see how to programmatically obtain it by using AMO and PowerShell.