Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services

Appendix D. MDX Reference

This Appendix provides information on those aspects of the SQL Server 2008 implementation of the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) language relevant to Reporting Services authors. The material provided here is intended to provide a quick reference and not to be fully instructional. Nor is it intended to provide an overview of SQL Server Analysis Services. For a complete reference on these topics, please refer to Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services with MDX (Wrox).

Object Identifiers

All objects within Analysis Services — cubes, cube dimensions, attributes hierarchies, user-hierarchies, hierarchy levels, members, and so on — are referenced through an object identifier. An object identifier is a value containing between 1 and 100 characters. The first character of the object identifier must be a letter or an underscore. Subsequent characters can be letters, decimal numbers, or underscores. Object identifiers cannot contain spaces or special characters and cannot be a reserved keyword, as identified in the next section of this Appendix. Identifiers adhering to these rules are known as regular identifiers.

An object identifier violating one or more of these rules is known as a delimited identifier. A delimited identifier must be encapsulated by square brackets — known as the object's delimiters — in order for the identifier to be correctly interpreted. Although required for delimited identifiers, square brackets can also be used with regular ...