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 ...

Any hint how to optimize operation on leave level, e.i. I have a margin on leave level & product dimension (parent-child) & organization (parent-child), I need to have a margin on the parent, so I wighted margin with a balance on leave level & divide a balance on parent. I need to leave sum aggregation on margin because of ...

How many elements in the set have distinct values ? This sounds like a simple question. Apparently, this is well known problem in Excel, and there is a classic solution for it. There are plenty of sites in Internet (for example here and here) which give the following solution: =SUM(1/COUNTIF(A1:A6,A1:A6))) (note that this formula needs to be ...

NextAnalytics is a young BI company founded by Ward Yaternick of OLAP@Work fame. He has a blog dedicated to his new product, and while I was reading it, I ran across the post named “Can a business intelligence product be used to answer analytic questions?”. The main premises of this post was that real-life non-trivial calculations are very ...

Partitions have been a built-in feature of Analysis Services ever since the first version. Naturally, all the engine subsystems, including the MDX query optimizer, work well with partitions. There are rare cases, however, when over-aggressive prefetching can generate query plan which is not optimal with respect to the partitioning scheme. ...

As the readers of my blog know, bulk evaluation mode (called ''block computation mode'' in Katmai) delivers much better performance in MDX than the cell-by-cell evaluation mode. Therefore the most important optimization technique with MDX in Analysis Services is to rewrite MDX in such a way that makes block computations possible. Easy to say, ...

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 ...

The subject of multiselect friendly calculations is a popular one in forums. I have written about it before here, here and here. In February 2008 I will write a blog which will give a definite answer on how AS2008 will deal with it (which is follow up on this post). But in the meantime, questions about AS2005 keep coming. By now, most people ...

Redmond, WA September 18, 2007 - Mosha Pasumansky today announced the immediate availability of MDX Studio Community Technology Preview (CTP) 1, version 0.1 Alpha. MDX Studio is tool which helps users of Microsoft Analysis Services to analyze complex MDX expressions, monitor performance characteristics of MDX queries and get insight into how ...

Moving averages is an important statistical technique for analyzing time series data. It is often used to do forecasting or trend estimations, and it is especially popular for analyzing financial data. There are many different types of moving averages, from simple to weighted to exponential etc. ''Moving average'' article in Wikipedia is a ...