Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services

Appendix C

MDX Reference

This appendix provides information on aspects of the SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, and 2012 implementations of the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) language relevant to Reporting Services authors. The material provided here is intended to provide a quick reference, not to be fully instructional. Nor is this material intended to provide an overview of SQL Server Analysis Services. For a complete reference on these topics, refer to Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services with MDX (Wrox).

Object Identifiers

All objects within Analysis Services — cubes, cube dimensions, attribute 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 underscore. Subsequent characters can be letters, numbers, or underscores. Object identifiers cannot contain spaces or special characters and cannot be a reserved keyword, as discussed in the next section. Identifiers adhering to these rules are called 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 — for the identifier to be correctly interpreted. Although required for delimited identifiers, square brackets can also be used with regular identifiers.

Reserved ...