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

Introduction


This chapter contains some of the more advanced MDX topics.

Here we'll learn how to isolate and display members without children, how to isolate members with data in parent-child hierarchies, how to display their individual values, and other useful information regarding unbalanced hierarchies. Unbalanced hierarchies are hierarchies that appear to have holes inside their dimensional structure and can have missing members from the bottom up.

Next, we're going to learn how to deal with randomness. We're going to show how to display random numbers, how to work with random samples from a hierarchy, and how to get random samples from a random hierarchy. Because the samples are random in nature, we can use a single report to show different information. Such reports can be used for monitoring purposes.

We'll close the chapter with two complex recipes. The first one explains how to perform multiple sorts or how to use several conditions in order to sort members of a hierarchy. The second...