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Just a quick reminder that if you’re struggling with getting Analysis Services to build successfully one of the errors you might see is ….

Failed to build the OLAP cubes. Error: Analysis Services session failed with the following error: Failed to connect to the Analysis Services server BenHowardSQL08. Error: Cannot connect to the repository. Analysis server: BenHowardSQL08 Error: Provider cannot be found. It may not be properly installed.

This is basically letting you know that you don’t have the correct SQL Native Client installed.

This occurred for me on a Windows 2008 box, using SQL2008 on another server.  All software was 64 bit.

I used the following technet article as reference for the installation to get the cube bits loaded… (I had arrived onsite and the customer hadn’t done any cube configuration) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd285466.aspx and as per the article I downloaded and installed the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Native Client from the Feature Pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - December 2008 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=142288).  This has a timestamp of Nov 2008 (and is called sqlncli_x64.msi)

Knowing that everything wasn’t right, I hunted around again and installed the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native Client from the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, October 2008  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=228de03f-3b5a-428a-923f-58a033d316e1&DisplayLang=en.  This has a timestamp of July 2008 (and is called sqlcli.msi)

This resolved the problem and everything works sweetly.

Thanks to Brian Smith’s blog (and of course Brian for writing it) which pointed me in the right direction.  http://blogs.msdn.com/brismith 

Cheers,   Ben.