September 2008 - Posts

• Displaying duration values – MDX expressions in FORMAT_STRING

  Suppose you have a calculation (or even a real measure) which returns elapsed time or duration. We want to present it to the user as such, i.e. break into hours, minutes and seconds. This sounds easy enough, we would just use appropriate FORMAT_STRING. Read More... Posted Friday, September 26, 2008 9:01 PM by mosha | 13 Comments Filed under: mdx

• Mosha’s blog in other languages

  Apparently some people find my blog useful enough to bother to translate it into other languages. Two sites in particular behaved nicely and asked my permission. So if you find it easier to read Japanese or Russian rather than English, the following resources Read More... Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 10:03 PM by mosha | 1 Comments

• Hierarchical trace profiling with MDX Studio

  Profiling and tracing functionality of Analysis Services is very valuable in analyzing query performance. Trace contains wealth of information about what is happening in the server. However, I found out, that this information might not be very easy to Read More... Posted Sunday, September 21, 2008 6:30 PM by mosha | 1 Comments Filed under: mdx studio

• Ratio to “Parent on Rows” in MDX

  Every now and then the issue of computing a generic “ratio to parent” calculation comes up. There is a good overview of the problem in Darren Gosbell’s blog “ MDX ratio of current parent issue ”. I want to pick up the conversation where Darren left it: Read More... Posted Thursday, September 11, 2008 11:15 PM by mosha | 10 Comments Filed under: mdx

• Inspecting calculation dependencies with MDX Studio

  MDX Studio is a universal tool for developing, debugging and analyzing MDX. With 0.4.6 release , there is a new feature in MDX Studio which allows to inspect and analyze dependencies between different calculations. Dependencies are automatically calculated Read More... Posted Sunday, September 07, 2008 5:52 PM by mosha | (Comments Off) Filed under: mdx studio

• Finding lowest common ancestor in set

  This thread on MSDN forums asks seemingly easy question – given a multiple selection of elements in the parent-child hierarchy – how to find lowest common ancestor among them ? While it is fairly easy to do using stored procedure, it turned out to be Read More... Posted Tuesday, September 02, 2008 10:02 PM by mosha | 4 Comments

• Drillthrough on calculated measures

  Drillthrough is a great feature of Analysis Services, but it has a limitation – only cells without calculations covering them can be drilled through. This automatically rules out drillthrough for calculated members in general and calculated measures in Read More... Posted Monday, September 01, 2008 10:40 PM by mosha | 11 Comments Filed under: mdx, stored procedure