When attempting to build an OLAP cube, the build process might become unresponsive at the aggregation-creation phase even though CPU usage is high. The process will remain unresponsive until you manually halt the PROC OLAP step.

This behavior can occur when multiple worker threads that are used to read input data and write output results attempt to write to the same filename. Because one thread already has the file open, the next thread looking for the same filename cannot open the file and becomes stuck in a recursive loop.

There are two indications that can point to this problem:

1. The name of the output file.

   The filename has several components. The third component is based on a run-time timestamp. When this problem occurs, the timestamp component is a string of eight zeros such as:

   spdspgp_0000106A.00000000.0.0.0.spds9

   The filename should never have all zeros in the timestamp component.

2. Each worker thread attempts to open the same file.

   Each of the worker threads should open its own private output file, where each file has a unique name. Instead, the threads are all trying to open a file with the same name. The duplicate filename can be seen in the WORK library location at the operating system level.

This behavior occurs more often on Unix platforms because of the way the internal time stamp value is captured. This behavior should not be a problem for Windows operating systems.

Select the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for SAS 9.1.3 (9.1 TS1M3) for this issue is available at:

A fix for SAS 9.1.3 (9.1 TS1M3) with Asian Language Support (DBCS) for this issue is available at: