Analysis Services

Microsoft Analysis Services

SSAS: Clearing the MDX Script for a session in SSMS

Sometimes when troubleshooting performance issues you may want to comment out the MDX Script in your cube in order to quickly isolate whether the MDX Script is a significant contributor to the issue. So if you can reproduce your issue in your dev environment you can open up your project in BIDS / SSDT, comment out the script and re-deploy. But what happens if you can't reproduce the issue against dev. You may not have the same server specs, or the same data volumes or you may even have design changes ......

SSAS: Executing MDX Scope statements using SSMS

So usually when I want to test an MDX expression in SSMS I'll write a query with a "WITH MEMBER…" clause to create a query scope calculated measure. But sometimes you may want to test a scoped assignment before putting it in your cube script. The following steps show you how to do this. 1. Click on the button to open an new MDX window, enter your server name and then click on the "Options >>" button 2. You must then specify the database that you are using 3. Then under the "Additional Connection ......

SQL PASS Summit & MVP Deepdives Volume 2

I'm currently in Seattle enjoying the start of some of the activities around the SQL PASS Summit. One of the activities that I'm looking forward to is the book signing session for the MVP Deepdives Volume 2 at lunchtime on Wednesday. I was fortunate to be one of the 60 or so authors this time around with a chapter on using Powershell to manipulate Analysis Services databases. All of the proceeds from this book go to support Operation Smile. You'll find the book's website here: http://www.manning.com/dela... ......

Book Review - MDX with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services: Cookbook

Full Disclosure: I was one of the technical reviewers on this book. I think my friend Tomislav did a great job on this book and it would make a valuable addition to the bookshelf of anyone that is working with MDX. I really enjoyed reading this and there were even a couple of interesting techniques that I have added to my toolkit. As far as I know there are not any other MDX books on the market quite like this one. It's more aimed at the intermediate level of MDX user and assumes that you have some ......

I'm an Analysis Services Maestro

A number of people have spotted this announcement on the SQLCAT blog already: http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/... but if you have not seen it yet, I’m very proud to say that I’ve been made an Analysis Services Maestro! If you have not heard about the Maestro program you can find out more details about it here; as Chris has said, it’s basically something like an MCM for Analysis Services. The course itself was a fair bit of ......

An Analysis Services 2008 nugget

I was experimenting with some of the PerformancePoint APIs today, but I was doing something wrong as I kept getting ERROR! back. I assumed that some of the parameters that I was using was resulting in invalid MDX being generated. I was running against a test database on SSAS 2005 and as I suspected there was a syntax error in the MDX. Unfortunately Profiler against SSAS 2005 showed me the error, but not the offending MDX, which was not much help. On a whim I decided to move my test database to SSAS ......

MDX equivalent of a filtered GROUP BY in SQL

Does that title make sense? I don't know if it does, but I can't think of another description for this problem. If anyone can think of a better title I would love to hear it. It's hard to explain in words so let's jump into some code examples. Consider the following SQL statement against the AdventureWorksDW relational database. The requirement is to select a list of 4 cities and then want to see the order quantity grouped at the country level. SELECT g.EnglishCountryRegionName Country ,sum(OrderQuantity) ......

SSAS: Are my Aggregations processed?

You have designed Aggregations for your cube, but how do you know that they are currently processed? Hopefully you have your processing routines setup in production so that your indexes are always kept processed. But maybe you are working in a development environment or you are performance tuning that you want to double check that your aggregations are currently processed. It is not immediately obvious how you can figure if the indexes for a partition or a set of partitions are processed as this ......

MDX needs a function or macro syntax

I was having an interesting discussion with a few people about the impact of named sets on performance (the same discussion noted by Chris Webb here: http://cwebbbi.wordpress.co... And apparently the core of the performance issue comes down to the way named sets are materialized within the SSAS engine. Which lead me to the thought that what we really need is a syntax for declaring a non-materialized set or to take this even further a way of declaring ......

A new blogger on the SSAS team

I just noticed that Jeffrey Wang from the Analysis Services team has started blogging. He has put up a great first post on “Execution Plans and Plan Hints for MDX IIF Function and CASE Statement”. Check it out here http://mdxdax.blogspot.com. If you want to subscribe you can get an RSS feed at  http://mdxdax.blogspot.com/rss.xml (I don't know why Blogspot does not make the rss easier to find)

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I am a consultant, based in Melbourne Australia. I primarily work in the Business Intelligence area with SQL Server, although I also dabble in Content Management Server and .Net coding

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