MDX in Analysis Services: Intermediate Concepts - Part 1 - Page 3

Returning Values within Analysis Manager

The focus of our hands-on examples in this lesson will be upon the use of MDX to access values inside our multidimensional data source. We will explore a couple of approaches to the retrieval of values within Analysis Manager in this section. One of our primary objectives will be to leverage the use of the current member concept.

To prepare for the lesson, let's shift from the Warehouse cube we used in Lesson One to the Budget cube that, like the Warehouse cube, is supplied as a sample with the Typical installation of Analysis Services. We will create a calculated member within the Budgets cube by following the steps below:

From the Analysis Manager console, and at the Cubes folder within the FoodMart 2000 database sample:

1.      Expand the Cubes folder (seen in the illustration below), by clicking the "+" sign to its left.

2.      Right click the Budget cube.

3.      Click Edit from the context menu that appears.

4.      When the Cube Editor screen appears, click the Data tab at its lower left (the Data Viewing pane).

The Data Viewing pane is activated, and appears as shown below in Illustration 2.

5.      Drag the Store dimension from the top pane down, and drop it on the existing top row axis label (Level 02 in the illustration, but this may differ depending upon previous actions performed in our individual sample databases, etc.), to replace the existing dimension (Account, in the case of the illustration) in the rows axis.

Dropping the icon that appears over the heading currently in place (a small, double-headed arrow appears at the "drop" point) "swaps" the existing dimension to the top and Store below, in the original dimension's old place.

The Data Viewing pane now appears as shown below: