There were not very many changes to MDX syntax in AS2008, and Vidas Matelis described most of them in his blog here (for his list of all changes in AS2008 check this blog entry). I just noticed that there is at least one more change which Vidas didn’t include, but which is somewhat important: ability to define CREATE SUBCUBE and subselects in non ...

Omniture Discover is not general purpose OLAP client tool. Rather it is specialized application that lets users to explore data from the Omniture’s Web Analytics product. But it does look and feel like an OLAP browser – which is not surprising, since “A” in OLAP stands for “Analysis”, and the product is all about analyzing web site performance. ...

Gross margin (also known as Gross profit margin or Gross profit rate) is defined as (Revenue – Cost of Sales)/Revenue. In terms of Adventure Works sample database we can write this in MDX as [Gross Margin] = ([Measures].[Internet Sales Amount] - [Measures].[Internet Total Product Cost]) / [Measures].[Internet Sales Amount]; While this ...

For scalar values a*b is the same as b*a. (although we saw that performance of these two could be different in MDX in “Performance of multiplication in MDX” article). But if a and b are sets, then obviously results are different – since the order of tuples in the resulting set will be different. But does it matter if we were to perform some other ...

One of the most significant changes in Analysis Services 2008 was improving performance of MDX queries and calculations. In particular, query optimizer can choose block (a.k.a. subspace) computation mode in query plan more often than in AS2005, and usually using block/subspace computation mode brings performance orders of magnitude better than ...

Setting partition slice has always been an important optimization technique in Analysis Services. Every presentation talked about it and every whitepaper mentioned it, for example the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services Performance Guide contains a chapter appropriately named “Define the Data Slice for Each Partition”, here is a quote from ...

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. If we read documentation, we quickly find that by using ‘hh’ for hours, ‘mm’ for minutes and ...

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: It is technically possible to get "kind of" close doing something like the ...

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 particular. This limitation has been a subject to much debate in forums and blogs. It has been ...

I need to find out about each item, how many stores have sold it! query below gives the total no. of stores count where all the items have been sold! what is wrong?  pl. help! with set temp as {nonemptycrossjoin({[Item].[Item Name].currentmember},{[Location].[Location Name].children},{[Measures].[Sales Qty]},2)} member measures.SetCount ...