Mosha released a new version of MDX Studio (0.4), which offers an ''MDX Analysis'' function that suggest best practices for a given MDX query. I tried the tool with some MDX query and it offers very good suggestion (when possible with link to further information about the issue) for both the MDX beginner and the MDX veteran. Sometime, the ...

Today I discovered that DefaultMember might result in a member other thant the default dimension member. Reading documentation, I got the idea that DefaultMember would be always the default member defined for a dimension into a cube. In reality, the default member could change into a subcube that excludes the original default member from a ...

Year-To-Date and Difference-Over-Previos-Year (or Year-Over-Year Growth) are among the most required features of any user. Some OLAP client (like ProClarity) offers features that try to solve this problem client-side, but I don’t like this approach given that you might have a server-side feature doing that (so you don’t discriminate Excel users). ...

Sometimes there is a simple way to solve an issue. For example, if you want to color all measures (including calculated measures) in red when the value is negative, you can simply write: SCOPE( Measures.AllMembers ); FORE_COLOR(THIS) = IIF( Measures.CurrentMember < 0, 255, 0); // 255 = RED END SCOPE;  MDX Script is so better than ...

I just found that this query has different behavior (with breaking differences in result) with different builds of Analysis Services 2005. This is the query (I used a bitmap because this query throws an error when I try to put it in text in Community Server blog - if someone want to check this other issue...): With Analysis Services 2005 ...

Chris Webb has recently released a really interesting tool: MDX Script Performance Analyzer. It's a really interesting idea that will save me (and you) a lot of time trying to understand the root of a performance issue into an MDX Script of a cube. Thank you Chris, if I only had this tool three months ago! :-) Chris has also posted the news of an ...

Often end users use Excel to navigate into the cube. Then they may ask you to produce a report using the same data. It would be useful to get the MDX query used by Excel. Moreover, Excel 2007 offers a good MDX quality of the produced query against Analysis Services 2005 (much better than Excel 2003). I don't know why Excel doesn't have such a ...