Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

7.2. Restricting Cube Space/Slicing Cube Data

A typical cube contains several dimensions and each dimension has several hundred or thousands of members. For example, if you have a sales cube that contains products, the products dimension would have at least hundreds of products if not thousands. During analysis of your data you would typically want to slice the data or drill down into specific sections of the cube to glean insights hidden in the data. Client tools help you to do slice, dice, and drill down in cubes. These client tools dynamically generate the MDX to restrict the cube space. Such tools dynamically generate MDX queries. In this section, "restricting cube space" is used loosely in the sense that we refer to restricting the cube space in the context of MDX scripts or restricting the data being returned to the client where users typically slice or dice the data. Several ways exist to restrict the cube space and analyze data and this section discusses some of the ways of restricting cube space using MDX to appropriately retrieve the section of the data.

7.2.1. Using the SCOPE STATEMENT

You already learned some techniques to restrict searchable cube space; use of which would depend on the context of your problem and what you are trying to accomplish by restricting the cube space. To refresh your memory, the SCOPE statement within MDX Scripts is used to restrict the cube space to form a subcube, which is a part of the cube projected along the dimensions mentioned within ...