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I'm consistently getting variations on this error when I process the cube in my first SSAS project:

Errors in the OLAP storage engine: The attribute key cannot be found when processing: Table: 'dbo_Transactions', Column: 'TransactionSK', Value: '68342998'; Table: 'dbo_Transactions', Column: 'TransactionDateTimeUTC', Value: '7625037'. The attribute is 'Transaction SK'.

The phrase "attribute key cannot be found when processing" gets a number of Google hits, and several hits on Stack Overflow too (1, 2, 3). However, these address broken FKs, NULL values, or duplicate values (e.g., due to inconsistent case sensitivity). None of those situations apply.

There's just one table here: dbo.Transactions. It has fields TransactionSK and TransactionDateTimeUTC, both INT NOT NULL. As you can guess, the TransactionDateTimeUTC field is an FK to a DateTimes table, but there are no missing records, that's enforced in ETL and I've verified it in SQL.

What else could be causing this error message? Why does it list two fields, TransactionSK and TransactionDateTimeUTC? The similar situations I've bumped into so far consistently only reference a single field in the error message.

The table is being updated in near-real-time, including occasional deletions, though the two fields in question are not updated. If a record is removed from the table after SSAS scans one column and before it scans another, will that produce this error? Spot-checking a few problem records, they were not created in the middle of process the cube.

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  • Are you processing full or incremental? Also have a look at rigid vs flexible relationships. Maybe your cube and dimensions out of sync with the underlying datawarehouse
    – Tom V
    May 28, 2015 at 18:25
  • @TomV: full processing; there are no hierarchies in the dimension. I can imagine that things could get out of synch if the system scans first one column, then another, then a third, while the underlying table is getting updated.
    – Jon of All Trades
    Jun 1, 2015 at 21:31
  • Is TransactionSK a foreign key to anything? SSAS can be deceptive about the queries that you are using to load. Drill all the way to the bottom and find the actual query used, which can be completely different to the table you see in the data source view. It's quite possible that the query loading your dimension is filtered in some way. One way or another, a key is in your fact but not in your dimension
    – Nick.McDermaid
    Sep 16, 2018 at 12:42
  • @Nick.McDermaid: I'm afraid I've left that SSAS package, and that database, in the dust of history. I'm 98% confident that there was no FK in place; I don't use them in the star schema layer of a data warehouse.
    – Jon of All Trades
    Sep 17, 2018 at 13:50

1 Answer 1

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In my case, I had 2 tables: Sales and Company.

I had one record 'ABC' in Sales, but it was supposed to be in Company. Because of that, when I processed the package I got the same error.

To fix it, I just created a row with '0' Id in Company, and kept all the columns in that particular row as unknowns. After that, I processed the package and it worked.

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