Tag Archives: hierarchies

3 SSAS Dimension Design Best Practices to Live By

After spending the last five years or so designing and performance tuning SSAS cubes and dimensions for the clients of Pragmatic Works, I’ve noticed there seems to be a recurring pattern with poorly designed dimensions. Because of this I wanted to take a few minutes to point out three easy things you can do to improve the performance and usability of your solution’s dimensions Continue reading 3 SSAS Dimension Design Best Practices to Live By

Navigating Hierarchies with MDX webinar recording is now available!

image Thanks to everyone that attended my webinar on Navigating Hierarchies with MDX! We looked at a bunch of different ways we can navigate up, down, and side to side in our hierarchies in order to do some really neat things with calculations. If you would like to view the recording, you can do that here completely for free! Also, if you’d like to view my PowerPoint slide deck and scripts I used for the webinar, you can download those from here. Just download the Navigating Hierarchies with MDX .zip file. 🙂

Now on to the questions!

Q: Is there anything like storeproc / pre stroed mdx query in SSAS which can be called in .net application.
A: There is a concept of SSAS stored procedures, which you can read more about here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176113.aspx and here: http://asstoredprocedures.codeplex.com/

Q: How would ParallelPeriod handle a leap year?
A: ParallelPeriod returns the member at the same position in the specified period. So if the 29th day of February does not exist in the previous year, then no value will be returned:
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Q: Can you use PeriodsToDate() on a ‘custom’ period like an Academic Term?
A: PeriodsToDate can be used on any user defined hierarchy.

Q: Setting date property for MTD, QTD seems straightforward.  What about WTD (week-to-date)?  It seems it might take some careful work each year.
A: If you have a Week attribute in your Date dimension, that should be set to Week, as well. That’s all that is required. 🙂
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Q: What is the name of the zoom tool and highlighter used, just curious.
A: Zoomit. It’s free, too! I get asked that question every time I present.

Thanks for all the great questions, everyone! If you have any further questions, please feel free to post it here or to send me a tweet!