If you have two columns in a table that "remember" their old values in two different historical tables, as it is the case in AdventureWorks with EmployeePayHistory and EmployeeDepartmentHistory, you may need (or just wonder how) to merge these two tables  Read more

Today I discovered that DefaultMember might result in a member other thant the default dimension member. Reading documentation , I got the idea that DefaultMember would be always the default member defined for a dimension into a cube. In reality, the  Read more

My backlog makes me late on a lot of announcements, but I'd like to post a link to the new MDX Studio by Mosha Pasumansky , because this is a very useful tool when you need to dig into an MDX query issue. There is a forum dedicated to the tool on SSAS  Read more

Darren Gosbell describes a useful technique to clear cache and execute an MDX statement using a single MDX command window. It's very very useful when you're doing performance tuning of your MDX script!  Read more

Microsoft released a short whitepaper about how scaling-out queries to a SSAS database leveraging on SAN snapshot features . It's an interesting read if you have a SSAS database with many users and don't have the time to copy a database on several servers  Read more

I fixed an issue of the DateTool dimension I presented in a previous post . The DateTool was unusable on OWC 11, which is the component used by BI Dev Studio and SQL Server Management Studio to browse a cube. I only added two statements in MDX Script  Read more

Alberto posted one of the patterns we use designing a dimensional model (this one is about the discretization of a measure into a dimension). We'd like to get some feedback about this solution: is there someone who used similar patterns? We consider this  Read more

A ranged dimension is a dimension that is used to have a discrete view of a continuous measure. A good example of this is the analysis of amount sold per order. In AdventureWorks we have, for each line of an order, the amount and quantity sold. We would  Read more

Microsoft has released a valuable white paper with a self-explaining title: SQL Server Best Practices Article: Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services . The document has a part of explanation of  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  Read more