MDX has been around for many years, but it seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance right now. I think there are various reasons for this. Dodeca has supported MDX in various ways for quite some time, and even dramatically enhances MDX support in its latest 7.3 release, including an MDX editor with advanced syntax highlighting and autocomplete (!), support for member lists generated from MDX queries, and more. I really prefer MDX over report scripts especially when it comes to generating member lists. The equivalent MDX queries always seem a little cleaner and succinct.
To that end, I thought I would start collecting various MDX examples that process dimensions/members in certain ways put them up on a page. There are examples for the Sample/Basic database that show fetching members from a dimension at various levels, with a UDA, sorted forwards/backwards, removing duplicates, and more. It’s nothing earth shattering (considering the super complex things that MDX can achieve) but in the future I foresee MDX being used even more for things like this.
Very helpful–thanks, Jason! I use MDX about twice a year, and I always have to relearn it. Your examples page will give me a good place to start.
Yeah, that was kind of my issue in the past too. And since half the time I bump into an Essbase issue and Google for it and hit my own blog anyway, I might as well do the same for some MDX queries. :D