If you write direct MDX queries using SSAS 2005/2008 as a PowerPivot data source, it is better if you prepare your MDX query by using another editor. For example, write and test your MDX query by using SQL Server Management…  Read more

The query designer in PowerPivot has a few limitations that require the manual modification of the MDX query to get data that are often needed to create a PowerPivot model that compares data from cube with data from other sources…  Read more

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will…  Read more

Short version: the latest available version of MDX Studio can be downloaded from http://www.sqlbi.com/tools/mdx-studio/ Long version: Last week Stacia Misner twitted that the online version of MDX Studio was no longer available. It was hosted on http://mdx.mosha.com. It was a…  Read more

SQL Server Analysis Services is a product that does not have its own product code, being sold as part of SQL Server. I think that also Microsoft does not know (and cannot know) the exact number of users. For this…  Read more

Mosha released a new version of MDX Studio (0.4), which offers an “MDX Analysis” function that suggest best practices for a given MDX query. I tried the tool with some MDX query and it offers very good suggestion (when possible…  Read more

Most of the readers of this blog probably have a good knowledge about MDX. But if you are new to MDX or want to improve a basic knowledge, and you’re in London or you are looking for a very good…  Read more

blog post

When the new thing is not new but still good

We did it again! Yesterday, as an April Fool, we published an article written by ChatGPT-4 (Revolutionizing Power BI: Introducing the Ultimate Formula Language), which described better than I could have ever done the excitement for a new revolutionizing language:…  Read more

Year-To-Date and Difference-Over-Previos-Year (or Year-Over-Year Growth) are among the most required features of any user. Some OLAP client (like ProClarity) offers features that try to solve this problem client-side, but I don’t like this approach given that you might have…  Read more

Jeffrey Wang wrote a great blog post about attribute overwriting in MDX that is very clear and full of helpful pictures to show what happens when you write an MDX statement that writes into your multidimensional space. This is very…  Read more