Introducing MDX basics – SELECT, FROM, WHERE
MDX serves two primary purposes when working with multidimensional data – querying data and enhancing the cube. In this section, we will walk through the basics of building a query with measures. We will be working in SQL Server Management Studio for this section. You will need to have your cube processed in order to create the queries.
Understanding multidimensional query concepts
SQL is a tabular query language. It returns data in columns and rows. A multidimensional model has more depth than columns and rows. This means you can have rows, columns, and other dimensions. Conceptually, every data point in a measure group is intersected by every level on every dimension in the cube. This will allow you to navigate the model in different ways. While MDX has the same core language construction as SQL, it adds expressions that support navigating data multidimensionally. Now you know why they are called cubes. Let's...