Chapter 1, Elementary MDX Techniques, uses some simple examples to demonstrate the fundamental MDX concepts, features, and techniques that are the foundations for our further explorations of the MDX language.

Chapter 2, Working with Sets, focuses on the challenges and solutions of performing the logic operations, NOT, OR, and AND, on Sets.

Chapter 3, Working with Time, presents various time-related functions in MDX language that are designed to work with a special type of dimension called the Time and its typed attributes.

Chapter 4, Concise Reporting, focuses on techniques that you can employ in your project to make analytical reports more compact and concise, and therefore, more efficient.

Chapter 5, Navigation, shows common tasks and techniques related to navigation and data retrieval relative to the current context.

Chapter 6, Business Analytics, focuses on how to perform some of the typical business analysis, such as forecasting, allocating values, and calculating the number of days from last sale date.

Chapter 7, When MDX is Not Enough, discovers that MDX calculations are not always the place to look for solutions. It illustrates several techniques to optimize the query response times with a relatively simple change in cube structure.

Chapter 8, Advanced MDX Topics, contains more advanced MDX topics, such as dealing with parent-child hierarchies and unbalanced hierarchies, getting random samples from a random hierarchy, and complex sorting and iterations.

Chapter 9, On the Edge, presents topics that will expand your horizons, such as clearing cache for performance tuning, executing MDX queries in T-SQL environment, using SSAS Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), drillthrough, and capturing MDX queries using SQL Server Profiler.

To run the examples in the book the following software will be required:

This book is for multidimensional cube developers or multidimensional database administrators. It is also for report developers who write MDX queries to access multidimensional cube. If you are a power cube user or an experienced business analyst, you will also find this book invaluable.

In other words, this book is for anyone who has been involved with multidimensional cube. This book is for you if you have found yourself in situations where it is difficult to deliver what your users want and you are interested in getting more information out of your multidimensional cubes.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Alternatively, we could have used the Aggregate() function instead."

A block of code is set as follows:

SELECT
   { [Measures].[Reseller Order Quantity],
     [Measures].[Reseller Order Count] } ON 0,
   NON EMPTY
   { [Date].[Month of Year].MEMBERS } ON 1
FROM
   [Adventure Works]
WHERE
   ( [Promotion].[Promotion Type].&[New Product] )

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

SELECT
   { [Measures].[Reseller Sales Amount] } ON 0,
   { ParallelPeriod( [Geography].[Geography].[Country],
                     2,
                     [Geography].[Geography].[State-Province]
                                .&[CA]&[US] ) } ON 1
FROM
   [Adventure Works]

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "We can verify this by browsing the Geography user hierarchy in the Geography dimension in SQL Server Management Studio".

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