Art of reading MDX articles

I learnt MDX much more by reading articles by knowledgeable people in this industry, Mosha for example. These extremely well written articles are sprayed with numerous MDX queries each explaining the nuances of MDX. Earlier, I used to open two windows, one for reading article and other for executing MDX queries. Many a times, continuous copy and paste distracted the subject context.

Of late, I have devised a new technique. I just copy and paste the complete article in SS Management Studio's MDX query editor and just read in that. Whenever, I need to execute the query, I just select the query text portion and execute it. Now, I don't have to switch between windows or lost my focus, of course at the cost of text formatting. I wish I could do the same thing in Mosha's MDX Studio but it does not support text wrapping. (I have devised another technique where I copy and paste the article in my Notepad++ text editor and then re-wrap the text to the desired width and then paste).

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It works great for me to read text based articles with lots of MDX in it without getting distracted.

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My Articles

Design

Cube structure optimization for MDX query performance in Analysis Services 2005 SP2: Tips for Parent Child Hierarchies usage

Fact table design for “State Workflow Analysis”: Analysis Services Dimensional modeling

Handling inter-dimensional members dependency and reducing cube sparsity using reference dimensions in Analysis Services 2005 SP2 : Cube design tip

Identifying intra-dimensional members relationship and reducing cube sparsity in Analysis Services 2005 SP2 : Cube design tip

Leaves() : An example to understand it for both regular hierarchies as well as parent child hierarchies

Aggregation design: useful tips

Level based attribute hierarchy: MDX query performance woes in SQL Server 2005 SP2: Is it fixed in post SP2 hotfix?

Parent child hierarchy to level base hierarchy conversion: hiding placeholder dimension members in client application

Trouble / Troubleshooting

Aggregate(), Sum() functions using calculated members does not work in Analysis Services 2005 SP2 (9.00.3042.00 version) but works in Analysis Services 2000 SP4

Analysis Services 2005 migration tool: Custom member formula issues in migrated database

Cube Partitions: Fact table not listing in Business Intelligence Development Studio in partition wizard

Analysis Services 2005: Many-to-Many relationship does not support unary operators with parent-child dimension

MDX

NextAnalytics and MDX : Part 1 - Swap Cells with Row Labels

Selecting dimension's default member based on a member property

Sorting members on member codes / member properties

Time Dimension: How to set Default Member to Current Month

Setting dynamic default member in dimension X based on the current member of dimensions Y

ADOMD.NET

Code : utility code for converting cellset to a data table

Others

Google specialized search for Analysis Services and MDX web resources integrated in my blog

Art of reading MDX articles

MDX Expression Builder : Need for a tool making it easier for functional users to write MDX expressions, queries.

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