1. Implementing Business Analytics with MDX Chris Webb chris@crossjoin.co.uk www.crossjoin.co.uk London September 29th

2. Agenda What is MDX and why does it matter? MDX basic concepts MDX queries MDX calculations Demos!

3. The Need for Analytics Raw data is not enough for business intelligence – we need analytics Business questions can rarely be answered in terms of simple Sums and Counts Many complex queries and calculations are hard to do in SQL Doing calculations in Excel and tools like Reporting Services leads to business logic being duplicated across reports

4. Analysis Services and MDX Think of Analysis Services as a rich metadata layer for dimensional data Adds business logic that doesn’t exist in a relational model: −Interpret tables as fact and dimension tables −Which columns are measures −How measures should aggregate up −What hierarchies exist on dimensions −What order members should appear on hierarchies

5. What is MDX? MDX is the language of Analysis Services, and is used for: −Querying cubes −Defining calculations −Administrative tasks such as security MDX ‘knows’ the metadata that is built into Analysis Services cubes and dimensions This means it’s easier and faster to write BI- style calculations and queries

6. MDX Basic Concepts Members are individual items that you want to see values for in a report, −eg Years, Products or Customers Members are grouped into Levels, which in turn are grouped into Hierarchies −eg Years, Quarters, Months and Dates could be put together to create a Calendar hierarchy Tuples are co-ordinates to cell values within a cube Sets are ordered lists of members or tuples

7. MDX Queries To retrieve data from a cube you must run an MDX SELECT statement Superficially similar to a SQL SELECT statement, but many differences −Can have 0-many axes in a cellset −All axes are specified in the same way −‘Cross-tabbing’ is easy −MDX set functions make complex selections easy

8. MDX Calculations MDX Calculations take two main forms: −Calculated Members: create new members on a hierarchy −Scoped Assignments: overwrite the value of cells ‘within’ the cube Can be created on the cube, and so available to all users, or on a per-query basis Allow you to implement ‘derived’ values such as running totals or moving averages

9. DEMO MDX Queries and Calculations

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