November 2006 - Posts

• Performance of running sum calculations in SP2

  Since I started a series of blogs about AS specific changes in SP2, few people asked me to explain in more details some of the things covered in the SP2 list of changes . The most popular request so far was to explain performance optimizations for running Read More... Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 9:53 PM by mosha | 1 Comments Filed under: mdx

• Slicer and axis interaction in MDX Part 2 - Implicit Exists

  Last time we talked about interaction between slicer and axes in MDX SELECT query, we focused on how coordinate overwrite rules changed in SP2 to make actual results the same as expected results. This time we will discuss the implicit Exists between slicer Read More... Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006 2:49 PM by mosha | 2 Comments

• What are the natural hierarchies and why they are a good thing

  Analysis Services 2005 Service Pack 2 is just around the corner. Microsoft released the list of improvements made in SP2 . While many of them are self-explanatory, others could benefit from more explanations. I already wrote about two very important improvements Read More... Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 9:12 PM by mosha | (Comments Off) Filed under: ssas

• Visual Totals and Distinct Count

  One of the most talked about improvements in Analysis Services 2005 was support for Distinct Count measure over arbitrary set of members. I.e. the user can select subset of members over which he wants to get the value of Distinct Count measure, and it Read More... Posted Tuesday, November 07, 2006 9:36 PM by mosha | (Comments Off) Filed under: mdx

• Budget Variance - A study of MDX optimizations: evaluation modes and NON_EMPTY_BEHAVIOR

  According to OLAP Survey, the number one objective in building OLAP systems is performance.  Certainly postings in newsgroups and forums confirm that finding. It is safe to say, that the most frequent question people are asking is "How do I Read More... Posted Sunday, November 05, 2006 5:05 PM by mosha | (Comments Off)

• Slicer and axes interaction in MDX Part 1 - coordinate overwrites

  OLAP is often described as 'slice-and-dice', which reflects the fact that slicing is the most fundamental OLAP operation. Traditionally, in MDX, the slicing was done by using the WHERE clause. While Analysis Services 2005 introduced the notion of subselects, Read More... Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 11:02 PM by mosha | 3 Comments