Monthly Archives: January 2006

BI Pathfinder

January 26, 2006 By in Project Management 3 Comments
Yet another beta test invitation arrived the other day, for an intriguing new tool called BI Pathfinder:
 
To quote the website’s FAQ:
BI Pathfinder is a methodology based software tool providing a structured approach to specifying and documenting BI Reporting systems.
 
If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester too, send a mail to beta@bipathfinder.com.
 

ascmd tool beta

January 23, 2006 By in On the internet Leave a comment
I’ve just noticed Dave Wickert’s post on the following thread on the Analysis Services MSDN forum, and thought I’d flag it up:
 
If you’ve ever wanted to be able to execute MDX or XMLA from the command line then you might want to sign up to be a beta tester for the tool he’s co-developing. Here’s a summary from the original post:
With it you can execute either an XMLA script or an MDX query. Input and output can come from either the command-line or files. It is called ‘ascmd’ and is patterned after sqlcmd’s syntax and capabilities. Optionally you can as it to capture trace events  issued on the session (like SQL Profiler does). It runs over both tcp/ip connections and http access and it supports the new AS2K5 multi-instancing also.
 
UPDATE: ascmd is now available in the April SQL2005 samples download, available here:

MDX Limericks

January 19, 2006 By in Off-topic 8 Comments
Since last summer’s ‘OLAP Jokes’ entry was the most popular (in terms of links to it) entry I’ve made on this blog so far, I’ve been wracking my brains for a suitable follow-up. During my lunchtime browsing today I came across this posting on a certain Phil Factor’s blog:
…and thought that anything those SQL guys can do, us MDX-ers can do better. So I’d like to announce an MDX limericks competition. No prizes apart from the admiration and respect of the entire Analysis Services community, I’m afraid, but who needs prizes when faced with a noble challenge such as this?
 

Here are the rules:

  • Each entry must be an MDX query executable against any cube/perspective in the Adventure Works database, and must take the form of a limerick (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_(poetry for details)
  • The query must return at least one cell which contains a value other than null
  • Entries should be posted as comments to this blog entry
  • Extra points will be awarded for wit and creativity

It’s actually pretty difficult. Here’s my first attempt:

WITH MEMBER [Date].[Day Name].[TODAY]
AS 1 + [Date].[Day Name].[THURSDAY]
SELECT [Average Rate]
ON 0, [Date].[Date]
ON 1 FROM [Direct Sales] WHERE([MAY])

As an aside, this brings up the vexed question of how you should pronounce MDX. In my limerick I’m not pronouncing the punctuation so it reads:

WITH MEMBER DATE DAY NAME TODAY,
AS ONE PLUS DATE DAY NAME THURSDAY,
SELECT AVERAGE RATE,
ON ZERO, DATE DATE,
ON ONE FROM DIRECT SALES WHERE MAY.

However I’m prepared to be flexible on this point.

So come on all of you (and especially you Jon, as I know you can never resist something like this) and get composing!

 

UPDATE: I’ve decided two rule changes, to make things easier. First I’ll allow queries from Foodmart 2000 for those of you on AS2K; second I’ll allow statements other than SELECT statements (eg CREATE SET, UPDATE CUBE etc) so long as they execute without errors.

 

The StrTo functions and CONSTRAINED

January 17, 2006 By in MDX 12 Comments
If you’ve been using Reporting Services 2005 to generate MDX you’ll have probably noticed that the StrTo<Something> family of functions (StrToSet, StrToMember, StrToTuple, StrToValue) have gained an extra, optional parameter – the CONSTRAINED flag. It’s not mentioned in Books Online and since someone has been asking about it on the newsgroup I thought it would be worth a quick post explaining what it does.
 
Basically it’s a security feature for middle-tier scenarios to stop MDX injection attacks. Running parameterised MDX queries in RS is probably going to be the most common example of when you’d want to use it, but I guess anywhere where you are generating dynamic MDX in code you’re running the risk of an evil user trying to pass you a stored procedure call (or something worse) instead of the member name or key you were expecting. By putting the CONSTRAINED flag in your query you automatically restrict what the StrTo<Something> functions can accept as their first parameter:
  • StrToMember can only take a string containing a member name
  • StrToSet can only take an explicitly defined set, ie a list of member names or tuples in curly brackets
  • StrToTuple can only take an explicitly defined tuple, ie a list of member names in brackets
  • StrToValue can only take a constant value
What’s not allowed with CONSTRAINED is an MDX expression which evaluates to either a Member, Set, Tuple or Value. Here’s an Adventure Works query which illustrates this:
 

WITH

MEMBER MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST1 AS COUNT(STRTOSET("{[Measures].[Internet Order Quantity]}"))

MEMBER

MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST2 AS COUNT(STRTOSET("MEASURES.MEMBERS"))

MEMBER

MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST3 AS COUNT(STRTOSET("{[Measures].[Internet Order Quantity]}", CONSTRAINED))

MEMBER

MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST4 AS COUNT(STRTOSET("MEASURES.MEMBERS", CONSTRAINED))

SELECT

{MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST1, MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST2, MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST3, MEASURES.STRTOSET_TEST4} ON 0

FROM

[ADVENTURE WORKS]

 
The final calculated member here produces an error because "MEASURES.MEMBERS" is an expression which evaluates to a set and is not an explicitly defined set like the ones in the first or third calculated members.
 
UPDATE: Jon makes a good point in the comments…

Paper on Data Mining Reports

January 17, 2006 By in On the internet Leave a comment
There’s a good paper on how to create Reporting Services reports which use Analysis Services data mining available here:
It’s taken from Teo Lachev’s book, Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005, which is on my list of must-buys (other sample chapters are available here: http://www.prologika.com/Books/0976635305/Book.aspx and it looks like it’s pretty good in terms of content).

Impressions of Pentaho

January 12, 2006 By in On the internet Leave a comment
Not Microsoft BI-related, but I guess we all know we need to keep an eye on what’s happening in the open source BI space. To that end I thought I’d link to the Bayon Technologies blog (usually covering Oracle BI) where there’s a good, ongoing series of posts on Pentaho. See:
…for the story so far.
 

Data Mining Amazon Wish Lists

January 11, 2006 By in Data Mining 1 Comment
I’ve seen this article linked to by several people today and thought it was worth posting up myself:
Not true data mining as BI folks understand it, but once you’ve got the data just think what you could do with it using AS2005 data mining (something similar to what Amazon are already doing with it, I guess). By the way, if anyone wants to buy me a present…

NON EMPTY limitations

January 6, 2006 By in MDX 14 Comments
I was putting together a ridiculously large query for my previous post to try to test performance of the HAVING clause, and tried to run the following on Adventure Works:
 
SELECT [Measures].[Internet Order Quantity] ON 0,
NON EMPTY
[Customer].[Customer].MEMBERS
*
[Date].[Date].MEMBERS
*
[Product].[Product].MEMBERS
*
[Geography].[City].MEMBERS
ON 1
FROM [Adventure Works]
 
To my surprise, I got the following error message:
 

Executing the query …

The expression contains a function that cannot operate on a set with more than 4,294,967,296 tuples.

Execution complete

 
Obviously some kind of internal limit here to do with NON EMPTY: the query runs if you remove it. Now 4,294,967,296 tuples is a lot of tuples but imagine that you had a million customers and ten thousand products, and you wanted to find out which customers had bought which products – you’d want to find the non empty combinations in a set of tuples which is still larger than that limit. OK in any normal cube this would probably bring back far too many rows to be a useful query, but what if you had a very specific slice in the WHERE clause (eg adding WHERE([Ship Date].[Date].&[1])  onto the end of the above query still gives the same message) so that you’d only expect to return a very small number of rows in your results? There are certainly going to be ways to work around this if you are writing your own MDX, but I wonder if any of the commercially available client tools which use NON EMPTY know to do this yet? Hmm…
 
 

The HAVING clause

January 4, 2006 By in MDX 1 Comment
The fact that there’s now a HAVING clause at all in AS2005 MDX doesn’t seem to be publicly documented anywhere, as far as I know; it’s one of those hidden features we found out about while researching ‘MDX Solutions’. While George has a full write-up on how it behaves in the book (coming soon to a store near you) here’s a quick overview of what it does…
 
Basically, it allows you to filter the contents of an axis without having to use the FILTER function. So, for example, the following Adventure Works query only returns the tuples on the ROWS axis which have Internet Order Quantity greater than 1000:
 

SELECT [Measures].[Internet Order Quantity] ON 0,
NON EMPTY
[Date].[Date].MEMBERS
*
[Product].[Subcategory].MEMBERS
*
[Geography].[Country].MEMBERS
*
[Customer].[Gender].MEMBERS
HAVING
[Measures].[Internet Order Quantity]>1000
ON 1
FROM
[Adventure Works]

 
Of course this isn’t anything you couldn’t do before in AS2K, so what’s the point of it? Well, first of all, if you know how you’d do this using a FILTER then you’ve probably already realised that using the HAVING clause makes your MDX much easier to read; as someone who in the past wrote the MDX generation component for a client tool, I can also say that it will also make generating MDX in code easier.
 
There also seem to be some performance benefits to using it too. Since I was told the HAVING condition is applied after the NON EMPTY, I rewrote the above query to use a combination of NONEMPTY and FILTER as follows:
 

SELECT

[Measures].[Internet Order Quantity] ON 0,
FILTER(
NONEMPTY(
[Date].[Date].MEMBERS
*
[Product].[Subcategory].MEMBERS
*
[Geography].[Country].MEMBERS
*
[Customer].[Gender].MEMBERS
,[Measures].[Internet Order Quantity])
,[Measures].[Internet Order Quantity]>1000)
ON 1
FROM
[Adventure Works]

 
I was expecting this query to perform exactly the same as the first one; however the version which uses HAVING seems to consistently perform better on my machine, although only slightly so. I’d be interested to know whether this is reproducible and why this is.