Technology Blueprints & Strategy with Gary Crisci

Something I've worked on a number of times and even spoke about at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference is MDX and specifically how to use it to do time related calcs like period-to-date functions and Time Balancing. I've seen quite a few posts on the subject and figured it was worth putting up some examples here. More recent releases of Essbase will do time balancing natively, but period-to-date is something you still have to work out. My preferred method of doing this is to add an analytic dimension to the database and set the formula in one of the calculated members. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, an analytic dimension is one that you add to your database that has a single default load member, all other members are calculated. In the case of time functionality I usually call this dimension [View] and have a default member called [Periodic]. I will then have some other members as needed, like [Time Balance], [QTD], [YTD], etc. For Example: The perio...

Ok, so for my first post I figured I would write about something that just happened the other day that I thought was pretty cool. By the way, this is pretty much going to be the format of this blog, when I do something that I think is cool, I'll write about it and if anyone can get any benefit out of it cool. So as I was saying, I came up against a little challenge the other day and the result came out pretty nicely. At the end of the day I had to create two different time roll-ups in my ASO cube. I thought about actually doing two different time dimensions (what the hell it's an ASO cube I can have as many dimensions as I want) I resisted this temptation and went back to my OLAP basics, would the two dimensions have any meaning if I cross tabbed them in a report? Answer: no; so I went back to alternate roll-up. Now an Alternate roll-up is certainly nothing new, and probably not worth writing about in and of itself, but this one did pose a couple of challenges. (For those...