I am positive that measure is not negative – Weird Analysis Services Cube Behavior

I ran into a situation recently that had me stumped for a bit, and there didn’t seem to be any other posts about this when I searched. I was working with a cube containing a very straightforward measure. This was an integer column and used an AggregationType of SUM. No other calculations were involved. When […]

Microsoft on SSAS and BI Vision Roadmap

A lot of this has been floating around various blogs and press releases, but here’s a very succinct synopsis of where MS is planning to go with Microsoft BI and the BI Semantic Model.

MDX Query to show number of child members in a Dimension

I was validating some assumptions about my dimensions’ data distribution and hierarchies and wrote some MDX to confirm the number of members. You could also do this by writing a SQL query against the relational table, but in this case I definitely wanted to see exactly what was coming from the OLAP dimensions. Here’s the […]

Solution to “Very strange results from MDX Query”

The solution to “Very strange results from MDX Query” It turns out that there was both a psychological component and a technical one. The sleuth who help me discover these issues was none other than my friend, former and occasionally current colleague, Scot Reagin. The technical issue: I was using FORMAT_STRING to format the numbers […]

Strange results from MDX Query

I am currently working on adding forecasting capabilities to an existing customer cube. The MDX to do this is based on calculations in an existing spreadsheet model. The spreadsheet works very well in terms of modeling the business accurately, but it’s a manually intensive process and does not recalculate automatically as needed. Perfect candidate for […]

Brilliantly stupid MDX debugging technique

Whenever I do something really stupid, rather than keep it to myself, I prefer to blog about it for the entire world to see. Even better – I came up with a debugging technique to save myself from my own, er, stupidity.The scenario is this: I am developing some SQL Server Analysis Services Date Calculations […]

Do as I say, not as I do

Perhaps that should be – Do as I say, not as Adventure Works and Project Real do SSAS modeling question: What’s the best approach to handling header/detail records? Approach #1) Use Measure Groups Approach #2) Consolidate via either ETL or relational operations Most clients I deal with have some form of Header/Details modeled in some […]