Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

Chapter 7. Advanced Topics in MDX

This chapter follows up on and extends what you learned back in Chapter 3: the basic concepts of the MDX language and how to write MDX queries. You also learned about the MDX operators and functions that are supported by the MDX language; including calculated member and named sets creation. If you are thinking, "that was so four chapters ago, I already forgot everything!" you might want to go back and review the material before continuing here. In Analysis Services 2005 majority of the calculations are defined as a script called MDX scripts. MDX scripts constitute complex calculations on multidimensional data which consist of MDX statements. CALCULATE, SCOPE, IF-THEN-ELSE and CASE are some of the MDX statements that are used within MDX scripts that help you define complex calculations that affect cube data. MDX scripts are structured in a way that the flow of the statements are simple and readable. The scripting language itself is based on a procedural programming model and although it may sound complex, it is actually simpler to use than certain predecessor technologies. This is due to simplifications in syntax. You can actually step through statements in MDX scripts and see results formulated in real-time; a real boon to the debugging process which you learn in chapter 9.

Of particular importance for successful MDX Script usage is an understanding and mastery of the various ways calculation order can be specified. In this chapter, you learn ...