Yesterday announcement of MDX Studio has generated lots of feedback, and I would like to thank everybody for taking your time to try this early version. Below I address most of the comments I received:

1. The error that got reported most is "Category not found" during execution of MDX query. I believe this error is due to inability to query perfmon counters. I will appreciate if people who run into this problem will check whether they get AS perfmon counters in the perfmon application. Especially the ones under "MSAS 2005:MDX", "MSAS 2005:Cache" and "MSAS 2005:Memory" categories.

In the meantime I have implemented a workaround, if some of the counters are not found, the query will still execute. The updated version is v0.1.1 and can be downloaded from http://cid-74f04d1ea28ece4e.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/MDXStudio/v0.1.1

This should unblock MDX query execution piece. However, MDX query execution is the least interesting aspect of MDX Studio. There are dozens of tools which allow MDX query execution, and SSMS does this just fine. The real power of MDX Studio is under the Parse button and inside MDX expression debugger. Both these features are not affected by the perfmon issue, and I am very interested to get feedback on them.

2. Skydrive is not available in all countries, so MDX Studio cannot be downloaded. If your country is excluded from Skydrive beta, you can download MDX Studio from www.mosha.com/msolap/MDXStudio/v0.1.1/MDXStudio.exe

3. Color coding doesn't work. How did I get pretty colors in the screenshots ?

Yes, color coding is not implemented yet. I wrote the queries in SSMS and copy pasted them into MDX Studio. Since MDX Studio still lacks many features (like functional drag and drop, color coding, open/save), I find it easier to write queries in SSMS and paste them back.

4. Drag and drop from metadata tree drops object caption instead of object unique name.

Thanks - this will be fixed in the future release.

5. Perfmon tab to show which aggregates were hit.

Cannot get this info through perfmon, but can get it from elsewhere. This will probably take a while until it is implemented.

6. Problem on Vista with error: Access to the registry key 'Global' is denied.

It worked on at least one another Vista installation, so I am not sure what the problem here. MDX Studio doesn't try to access registry directly

7. Not everything works with AS2000.

I need to do more testing with AS2000.

Thanks again.