June 2008 - Posts

• Analysis Services protocol – official documentation

  One of my most popular blog posts was “ Analysis Services 2005 protocol - XMLA over TCP/IP ”. Previously this information wasn’t available from anywhere else. But things changed today. Microsoft now has engaged in the “ Open Specification program ”. Citing Read More... Posted Monday, June 30, 2008 3:57 PM by mosha | (Comments Off)

• MDX Formatting with MDX Studio

  Darren Gosbell put up a blog post about MDX Formatting, where he describes how he prefers to format MDX to look nice on the screen. So I thought – why to leave to a human something that machine can do. I decided to implement these rules (with some modifications) Read More... Posted Monday, June 16, 2008 5:20 PM by mosha | 2 Comments Filed under: mdx studio

• No OLAP Market shares for 2007

  Every year around March or April I am looking forward the OLAP Report site to see the OLAP market share numbers. Computing these numbers is not a simple task as Nigel Pendse explains on http://www.olapreport.com/market.htm , and this kind of analysis Read More... Posted Monday, June 16, 2008 10:12 AM by mosha | 1 Comments

• Counting distinct values in MDX

  How many elements in the set have distinct values ? This sounds like a simple question. Apparently, this is well known problem in Excel, and there is a classic solution for it. There are plenty of sites in Internet (for example here and here ) which give Read More... Posted Saturday, June 14, 2008 6:13 PM by mosha | 12 Comments Filed under: mdx, stored procedure

• BI Survey 8

  BI Survey 8 is up and ready to accept participants. It’s hard to believe that we are at version 8 of what started as OLAP Survey 1 back in 2000. (On the other hand, my daughter also recently turned 8, she was born in 2000 too, and I still cannot believe Read More... Posted Friday, June 13, 2008 11:28 PM by mosha | (Comments Off)

• Follow up on NextAnalytics challenge

  My post “ MDX answer to NextAnalytics challenge ” triggered some very active discussion, and I would like to address some of the comments Chris Webb said: I've done a fair amount of teaching MDX and the truth is that people do find even the basics very Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008 11:28 PM by mosha | 6 Comments

• MDX answer to NextAnalytics challenge

  NextAnalytics is a young BI company founded by Ward Yaternick of OLAP@Work fame. He has a blog dedicated to his new product, and while I was reading it, I ran across the post named “ Can a business intelligence product be used to answer analytic questions? Read More... Posted Sunday, June 08, 2008 6:05 PM by mosha | 7 Comments Filed under: mdx