The holy grail these days seems to be to get all the data into a unifying database – with relational and NoSQL camps each trying to come out the winner. Meanwhile, you’ve got data to gather, manage, and analyze, and that typically means you’ve got to use different types of storage. To get the most [...]

In one my recent MDX classes, a student asked about automation of MDX queries for the purposes of testing query performance, so today I’ll answer that question and draw your attention to a few resources available. Get the ASCMD Utility If you’re running SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services or SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services, [...]

Welcome to my third post in a series of topics on MDX for SQL University. If you’re just now joining me, you should check out the first post, Location, Location, Location, and my previous post, Writing Simple Queries, to get oriented. I’m going to continue building on the concepts introduced in the earlier posts by showing [...]

This post is the second in a series of topics on MDX for SQL University. In my first post, Location, Location, Location, I introduced the tuple as a way to retrieve data from a cube with very precise instructions about what you want. In this post, I’m going to show you how to do that by [...]

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I first met Tomislav Piasevoli’s (blog|twitter) in 2008 at the PASS Summit in Seattle, and saw him again most recently again in Seattle at PASS Summit 2011. There I had the pleasure of telling him personally how much I liked his book. There are not many MDX books [...]