Book Image

MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook - Second Edition

Book Image

MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook - Second Edition

Overview of this book

MDX is the BI industry standard for multidimensional calculations and queries. Proficiency with this language is essential for the realization of your Analysis Services' full potential. MDX is an elegant and powerful language, and also has a steep learning curve.SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services has introduced a new BISM tabular model and a new formula language, Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). However, for the multi-dimensional model, MDX is still the only query and expression language. For many product developers and report developers, MDX is the preferred language for both the tabular model and multi-dimensional model. MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook is a must-have book for anyone who wants to be proficient in the MDX language and to enhance their business intelligence solutions.MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook is packed with immediately usable, practical solutions. It starts with elementary techniques that lay the foundation for designing advanced MDX calculations and queries. The discussions after each solution will provide you with a solid foundation and best practices. It covers a broad range of real-world topics and solutions and provides you with learning materials to become proficient in the language.This book will guide you through the hands-on and practical MDX solutions, best practices, and many intricacies that hide within the MDX calculations and queries. We will start by working with sets, creating time-aware, context-aware calculations, and business analytics solutions, through to the techniques of enhancing the cube design when MDX is not enough. We will then move on to capturing MDX generated by SSAS front-ends and using SSAS stored procedures, and we will explore the whole range of MDX solutions for real-world BI projects.  
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
MDX with SSAS 2012 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Isolating the best N members in a set


Hierarchies can contain a lot of members. In this recipe we are going to show how to extract only the significant ones; members with the highest value for a certain measure.

This requirement is often necessary because not only does it allow end users to focus their efforts on a smaller set of members, but also the queries are also much faster.

We will base our example on the TopCount() function, a function that returns the exact number of members as specified. In addition to that function, MDX has two more similar functions, namely TopPercent() and TopSum(). Contrary to the TopCount() function, these functions return an unknown number of members. In other words, they are designed to return a set of members based on their contribution, in percentage or in absolute value, respectively.

Further similarities and differences between TopCount(), TopSum(), and TopPercent() functions will be covered in later sections of this recipe.

Getting ready

Start SQL Server...