MDX Solutions: With Microsoft® SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion® Essbase, Second Edition

Chapter 3. Common Calculations and Selections in MDX

Having had a brief introduction to queries, and to how calculations are formed, you are ready to look at how a variety of common calculations and selections are expressed in MDX. Some will be trivial and amount to using one of the many MDX functions. Some will be less simple but composed of just a few of the functions working together. This chapter is an introduction to a vocabulary of the most commonly used functions. Here is where you start to actually see examples of composing MDX as small assemblies of "moving parts." Chapter 7 will put the vocabulary and techniques introduced here to more use.

This chapter will provide a fairly broad, technical introduction. Although we can make suggestions for how the techniques can be applied to different domains, such as analyzing trends in manufacturing quality, insurance claims, analyzing cross-sectional drug prescription behavior, or consumer purchasing patterns, most applications of MDX for analysis and reporting draw on the same collection of techniques tied together in only slightly differing ways. The rest of this book attempts to provide examples in terms of the Waremart 2005 application available on this book's web site. However, in order to provide techniques for domains not covered in that database, this chapter will provide illustrative MDX that does not correspond to any sample database.

Different application domains may use different terminology for the same technique. For ...