Yesterday, I posted about the new MDX subqueries. One place where they’re particularly intuitive is with multi-select In a WHERE clause tuple, you can have only one member for each attribute, so you can’t slice by both US and Canada. But users have wanted a multi-select slicer, so most client tools have taken the approach of creating a calculated member that aggregates the selected items and then uses that one member for the slicer. This sometimes gives the desired result, but has all sorts of problems. For one thing, the Aggregate function won’t work at all on distinct count measures. For another, the slicer caption is usually something dumb like “multi-select”.
With the new subquery structure, the UI can just change the FROM clause to (SELECT {[US],[Canada]},*) on 0 from [Sales]) which has very intuitive consequence of reducing the source space for the report.
- Reed