Saturday 29 March 2014

[Business Intelligence] XML Parsing Error

This post is a reference for all BI boys [& girls] who use Microsoft SSAS for their data warehouse and stumble upon the fairly confusing error "XML parsing failed at line 1, column 0: A document must contain exactly one root element" during SSAS routine deployment.

Obvious Googling would lead to a number of solutions, all of which would require re-processing from scratch or in some cases, re-building your SSAS configuration. The following links are all but spot-on:

  1. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/583d5fed-0f48-4a51-9618-31b833e82719/ssas-sudden-startup-problem?forum=sqlanalysisservices 
  2. https://scn.sap.com/thread/2095356 
  3. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1024873-391-1.aspx

The solutions in the aforementioned links are not time-savvy and when I stumbled upon this error pressed against time, I decided to try out something which I faintly thought would work. As a result, I stumbled upon the quicker solution to this problem as follows:

1. Navigate to the :\\\OLAP_Data\.0.db\ folder.
2. Delete everything inside this folder - .cub, .dim., .role files. [Relax!]
3. Hit the Deployment button in your SSAS project file.

The error will no longer appear and the cube will be deployed in no time [with previously processed partitions retaining their state, hence no need to re-process them from scratch]. I have faced this error ~5 times and the above solution has always worked!

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