Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

9.1. Measure Groups and Measures

In Chapter 6, you learned about measure groups and measures within a cube. To recap, a cube can contain one or more measure groups and each measure group can contain one or more measures. You also learned about the various aggregation functions for each measure, and reviewed some MDX examples of how measure values are rolled up while browsing the cube. In this section, you learn how to use an MDX function to simplify querying measure groups and how to group measures within a measure group to help users navigate them more easily. You also learn how to use properties to control how measure values are aggregated when unrelated to dimensions in the same query or when performing currency conversions. Lastly, you learn how to reuse measure groups in multiple cubes.

With Analysis Services 2008 it is quite possible to end up with a cube containing several measure groups. If you open the Adventure Works cube in the Enterprise version of the Adventure Works DW 2008 sample project, you will have measures as shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9.1. Figure 9-1

If you expand each measure group, you can see that most measure groups contain multiple measures. For example, the Internet Sales measure group has 9 measures and the Reseller Sales measure group has 11. Often, business analysis questions are targeted at measures within a single measure group rather than all ...