MDX and ASO – Implied Share Metadata Oddities

Essbase is Wrong

Once or twice I’ve got stuck troubleshooting an ASO query or MDX member formula, only to discover – after some head-scratching – that Essbase and I disagree about the appropriate value of a metadata property on an implicitly shared member. Whether the (very strange) behavior described below is by design I don’t know, but since ASO and BSO do not behave the same way and I can’t find any documentation describing a difference in this area, I have to suspect not. Continue reading

MDX and Missing Suppression

One feature of all Essbase query tools is the ability to suppress (i.e. remove from the result set) #Missing values, in most cases via a simple, on-or-off option that applies to full rows. In MDX, #Missing suppression is slightly more involved, but also has some interesting subtleties that make possible queries that would be harder or impossible (at least, in one step) to achieve using other tools. Continue reading