Today, I was trying to create a simple dimension, but kept getting the error "Attribute key cannot be found". Since I was processing a dimension without any relationship to another table, I was very surprised to see this error. It appeared that there was one record that had a column containing the character 'ë'. When I changed this to the character 'e', everything worked. So, after checking the collation I saw that the relational database was Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and the cube was Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI.
So, in order to fix this:
- Open the management studio
- Connect to the Database Engine
- Right click the Instance and select properties to see which collation is used
- Connect to the Analysis Services
- Right-click the Instance and select properties
- Click on "Language/Collation"
- In my case: check the box "Accent-Sensitive"
- Click Ok
- Restart the SQL Server service
- Restart the Analysis Services service
- Re-deploy the Analysis Services database
After that it worked. I guess the person who installed the software didn't select the default settings (?)