MDX

Posts relating specifically to MDX queries, expressions and statements

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 ......

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 ......

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 ......

Do DAX and MDX need a safe divide operator?

I’ve been teaching an MDX course for the last few days as well as reading Marco and Alberto’s excellent PowerPivot book on the train and it struck me that every time I do a division in both languages I seem to be using the following pattern in order to avoid returning an error to the user MDX: IIF( <denominator> = 0, NULL, <numerator> / <denominator> ) DAX: IF( <denominator> = 0, BLANK(), <numerator> / <denominator> ) I know that languages like C++ and C# don’t ......

MDX: Implicit Recursion

A few months ago Richard Lees did a blog post showing how you can calculate a LastNonEmpty measure using recursion. In Richard's example he used what I call "explicit recursion" in that he explicitly referenced the measure in it's own expression. An example of this sort of calculation against Adventure Works would look like the following. WITH MEMBER Measures.LastNonEmptyExplicit AS IIF(IsEmpty(Measures.[Internet Sales Amount]) ,([Date].[Calendar].PrevMem... Measures.[LastNonEmptyExpli... ,Measures.[Internet ......

SSAS: MDX Studio - 0.2.0.0 Released

For those of you who are interested, but may not have checked the MDX Studio forum in the last few days, Mosha has release a new update. You can read about the details and download the 0.2.0.0 release from the links on this posting http://www.ssas-info.com/fo... enjoy! Update: A new 0.2.1.0 release has just been made available that fixes a few issues that were found in the previous release (keep in mind that MDX Studio is still in the alpha phase) ......

SSAS: Query Performance Tuning Whitepaper

I suppose by now most of you have seen all the other posts about the Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services whitepaper that was just released. I saw them all too and I was not planning to do another yet another "read this cool whitepaper" post. But, even thoufh I have only just started reading through it, I do have a couple of points I want to make. 1) The first is a shameless plug: BIDSHelper www.codeplex.com/bidshelper gets a mention on ......

SSAS 2008: MDX changes in Katmai

Wow things have been moving fast this morning. First Mosha posts about some new features in SSAS 2008, that have been available for 3 months, but no one (to the best of my knowledge) has known about. No sooner do I complain to Mosha that none of this stuff was listed in any of the "What's New" pages in the CTP, that he comes out with this post pointing to the documentation for new features that are in the current CTP. (The old versions of the "What's New" pages do not seem to be available anymore, ......

I agree - It really is all about MDX (baby)

Nick Barclay did an interesting post recently, advocating learning MDX if you are going to be working with Performance Point Server. This is due to the fact that Performance Point builds SSAS cubes on the back end and SSAS which lives and breathes MDX. So the same advice really also extends to anyone using SSAS. You really need at least one MDX guru on your team - someone that can write MDX select statements, if you want to get the most out of SSAS. A couple of resources that Nick did not mention ......

SSAS IA64 Server Fun: Using VBA functions in MDX

Occasionally I have the pleasure of working with Analysis Services 2005 on an IA64 (64 bit Intel Itanium) servers and on the whole, most things work the same. But there is the occasional small difference that can cause some frustration. Background: In Analysis Services 2000, you could not use VBA functions in MDX calculations as the VBA library was COM based and had not been ported to the 64 bit platform. In SSAS 2005, the core VBA functions have been implemented in a .Net library which will run ......

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