Most often we think that the cubes we design and implement will process without any issues when the corresponding dimensions and facts have sensible data. This, however, is only a myth. I learnt this the hard way when I modified an existing SSAS cube which had some changes to the dimension attributes. The processing of the cube failed due to a mismatch of an attribute’s data type between a dimension in the data source view (DSV) and the dimension in the cube. That’s when BIDS Helper came to my rescue. I quickly installed BIDS Helper from here and ran its inbuilt Dimension Health Check feature to discover the hidden truth. I found BIDS Helper to be extremely useful to perform health checks on measures as well.

As soon as I run this feature on my measure group, it points out that the data type of measures contained within the group can be changed for optimised results. 

To keep this post short and quick, I would recommend BIDS Helper if you run into data-type problems when processing SSAS cubes.

 You can download BIDS Helper and access the product’s documentation from the following Codeplex site: BIDS Helper