sentient beings

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my Lacie Internet Space was offline. Not a real problem, since the LaCie Internet Space will go offline every once in a while. A powercycle is usually enough to get it going again.

But to my dismay, not this time. I powercycled the LaCie Internet Space and it booted allright, the blue light came on and then ... nothing.

I dismantled the complete thing, took out the drive (Hitachi Deskstar 1TB 7200 RPM) and plugged it into my usb/sata converter and again, nothing happened.

Cue slight panic as my entire music collection was stored on this, as well as my wife's photo portfolio. Since the drive did seem to spin up, I suspected the logic board. I scoured the internet for an exact hard disk and found one. In the meantime, I had also bought a second hand LaCie Internet Space, thinking there would be a Hitachi Deskstar inside but it turned out to be a Samsung HD103SI. I discarded the second LaCie Internet Space and put all my hopes on the spare disc, which, by the way, was rather expensive due to the floods in Thailand.

I switched the logic boards, connected the Hitachi to the usb/sata converter and nothing happened. I replaced the logic boards and in a final act of lucidity decided to put the hard drive into the replacement LaCie Internet Space casing. All of a sudden, the disc sprang back to live, started rattling merrily and I could see the disc once again in my network places.

It seemed that the hard disc wasn't at fault but the original LaCie Internet Sace casing. Go figure. Why the drive wasn't recognised by the usb/sata converter is beyond me. I'm copying 1 TB of data to my other NAS right now and I'm never buying anything from LaCie again.

When deploying a cube to SSAS (Sql Server Analysis Services) 10.50 aka 2008r2 using Visual Studio 2008, I got the following errors.

1. Internal error: Invalid enumeration value. Please call customer support! is not a valid value for this element.
2. An error occurred while parsing the 'StorageMode' element at line 1, column 6751 ('http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine' namespace) under Load/ObjectDefinition/Dimension/StorageMode.
3. Errors in the metadata manager. An error occurred when instantiating a metadata object from the file, '\\?\N:\SSAS\OLAP\Data\RMT_CUBE\RP DIM TIME.12.dim.xml'

Additionally, building the project and then deploying using the wizard results in a similar string of error messages

The column in the second error and the file referenced in the third error may vary. The filename in the third error however is worth noticing because it's the dimension that is stopping you from deploying. In this case, my dimension was named "RMT DIM TIME".

On the internet, you will find many solutions advising you to drop the database and redeploy. I have found a way that is less time consuming and a lot less worrying than simply dropping your entire database.

I was able to solve the problem by simply re-processing the offending dimension in SSMS (Sql Server Management Studio). After re-processing the offending dimension, life was peachy again.

Hope this helps you. Apparently, installing the latest SSAS service pack would also solve the problem but that's not always a straightforward solution in a managed environment.