MDX 2005

I attended a presentation on using MDX for discovering business info. This presentation focused on ways to query business data using MDX. Here's a few tips from the presentation:

Don't use the current member if you don't need it.
Root(Products) finds top "category" of hierarchy (in this case of products).

MDX 2005 allows the member definitions to be declared in order procedurally instead of having to weight them- this in my opinion will simplify MDX greatly. In addition, its possible to run MDX in debug mode and see the browser populate the results as built- also a nice feature.

MDX used to fail if there was a "missing member." Now, an option can be set so that the MDX just returns Null for these queries- so that MDX is more like SQL.

MDX will now do default type conversions. MDX is not case specific. Can use axis to find dimensions associated with a member. And there is now a Business Intelligence Wizard in Visual Studio that will assist in building standard MDX queries.