MDX with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services Cookbook

Book excerpt: 80 recipes for enriching your Business Intelligence solutions with high-performance MDX calculations and flexible MDX queries Enrich your BI solutions by implementing best practice MDX calculations Master a wide range of time-related, context-aware, and business-related calculations Enhance your solutions by combining MDX with utility dimensions Become skilled in making reports concise Learn how to optimize, dissect, and debug your MDX calculations Maximize your learning with detailed explanations following each solution Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to enrich your Business Intelligence solutions In Detail Microsoft SQL Server is an enterprise database platform that contains a multitude of technologies, Analysis Services being one of them. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) provides OLAP and data mining capabilities and allows users to analyze multidimensional data stored in cubes using the MDX query language. This cookbook contains over 80 practical, task-based recipes that show how Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services solutions can be taken further by enriching them with high-performance MDX calculations and flexible MDX queries. Packed with immediately usable, real-world recipes, the book starts with elementary techniques that lay the foundation for designing further MDX calculations and queries. Here you will find topics such as iterations on a set, Boolean logic, and dissecting and optimizing MDX calculations. In the first half of the book you will learn how to efficiently work with time, strings, metadata, calculated members and sets in general, and how to implement MDX solutions that are appropriate in a particular context: a time-aware calculation, a concise report, a calculation relative to another. You will also learn how to implement various types of conditional formatting, how to perform typical MDX calculations like ranks, percentages and average