Today i have learned of calculated members and how the are created. You use the “With Member” – clause to begin creating a calc member. Then write the name and where it should be placed and also where it derives from, calculation between different members ect. Then you continue with your select-statement and don´t forget to include the newly created calc member in the select-statement. Here are microsofts information about how to create a calculated member. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms146017.aspx.
Now i see what i have been creating is a query-scoped calculated member, i will have to check the “Create member” – way which they didn´t mention in the book. I have learned how to make the calc members initiate in a particular order with the “SOLVE_ORDER”-function. Set this after the definition of calc member to a value 1 for first order and so on..
I have looked a little bit at expressions as well and where you use a IIF-expression which is like a IF-statement in regular programming-language, you select an expression and if it´s true you show something and false something else. Good to use when for example you have null-values in results and you don´t want to show the value null.
Last thing a learned was different formatting option for the calculated members which you write after e.i. the IIF(…..), FORMAT_STRING = “Percent”. Here it will show the result column in percent, there are also “Currency” & “Standard” and some more ones can be found in above link.
I have been working with the “Step-by-Step” cube which comes with the book(“Microsoft Press Microsoft SQL Server 2008 MDX Step by Step”) and also been doing the examples toward my demo-db which belongs to the business system i am working with.
I am starting to get a small grasp of the SSAS-cubes and the way you query stuff. It´s still not fully easy to understand the way it returns data but i am getting there..
Next up are working with more complex sets.