During MS BI Conference 2008 I had a presentation called “Got MDX problems ? MDX Studio to the rescue !”. Given how the theme of self-service BI has been in the center of the conference, I decided to apply some self-service BI to analyze the performance of the presentation. The conference website provided all the evaluation data through Excel ...

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 digest. Profiler just shows flat list of lines and lines of trace events. However, there is an ...

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 whenever Parse Tree is built, and can be accessed in the dedicated tab. The picture below ...

With Visual Studio and other modern IDEs, Intellisense became a must have tool in the developer’s toolset, boosting productivity. MDX developers have asked for it, but full, context-dependant intellisense wasn’t available. Until now. MDX Studio now features comprehensive support for intellisense. The first version with usable intellisense support ...

In this article we will show how to take typical, everyday MDX and optimize it by simply following advices of MDX Studio Analyzer. As a starting point, I will take “Product Volatility” example as published by Thomas Ivarson in his blog. It is a perfect example, because Thomas took a real business problem, and implemented it using very clean and ...

Darren Gosbell put up a blog post about MDX Formatting, where he describes how he prefers to format MDX to look nice on the screen. So I thought – why to leave to a human something that machine can do. I decided to implement these rules (with some modifications) into MDX Studio. It became MDX Studio 0.2.8 release, available immediately for ...