Cubes – XLCubed Blog

Solve order shenanigans

XLCubed — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:22:15 +0000

Today I’m going to blog about a problem we recently solved in a client’s cube, an error in the Mdx script that’s very easy to make if you aren’t careful. We’ll run a simple example in AdventureWorks (what else?) to demonstrate the issue. The client had already added a calculation to their cube to show […]

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Ranking, Sorting and Filtering

XLCubed — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 14:24:09 +0000

Once we have returned cube members into a grid report we often need to exclude or change the order of the result set to provide more meaningful information. MDX (Multidimensional Expressions) language includes some very useful operators to provide filtering (FILTER), sorting (ORDER) and ranking (TOPCOUNT/BOTTOMCOUNT) of dimension members. These can be quite overwhelming even […]

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Sql Server “Denali” CTP3 – first impressions…

XLCubed — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:07:06 +0000

Microsoft recently released their third CTP of Denali the upcoming SQL Server release (SQL Server 2011), so here are some initial thoughts now it’s more widely available.: The first thing to look at is the new Tabular mode for Analysis Services (as opposed to the traditional multi-dimensional mode, which is still available). This is the […]

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Parent-Child Dimensions in Analysis Services – Performance Walkthrough

XLCubed — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:21:29 +0000

Parent-child hierarchies are a good fit for many data structures such as accounts or employees, and while they can speed development in some cases, they can also cause performance problems in large cubes. We often see customers with these type of performance issues, and thought it worth sharing a simple technique for altering the dimension […]

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Cube Design – meeting the business needs

XLCubed — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:42:34 +0000

Following on from our previous blog post on a couple of the common cube performance issues we’ve seen this last month, I thought I’d mention some of the non-technical issues we see quite often. In one case, once we’d made a few teaks and sorted out the cube performance issues we had to ask […]

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Common Analysis Services Performance Issues

XLCubed — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:14:41 +0000

A quick blog post from the Services team here at XLCubed on some performance problems with SSAS that we’ve seen again recently. With the processing power and memory available it’s pretty easy to build a fast cube – both for query performance and processing time. It is also easy to be lax in cube design, ignore the […]

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So, what’s an OLAP Cube, anyway?

XLCubed — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:07:11 +0000

As "An Excel User in a Cubed Kingdom" I’m starting my exploration of this new found land with a simple question: what is an OLAP cube? In plain English, please… I like this simple, non-technical definition: a cube is a set of predefined answers. It’s up to you to select the right questions. OK, let’s […]

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