Panorama Business Intelligence

Panorama software has been in the driving seat of MDX since it’s invention around the OLAP technology we sold to Microsoft back in 1996.
Since then we’ve taken MDX to the extreme. As such I wanted to share some of the reasons why MDX has revolutionized the world of BI…. I hope you enjoy this entry and please provide your comments.

So the invention of MDX (Multi Dimensional Expressions) is really the key cornerstones in the world of BI especially since its establishment  as a standard query language for OLAP servers. MDX has three powerful concepts embedded in it. These concepts together are what make MDX unique and allow users to ask complex multi dimensions questions.

First and foremost is the ability to handle multiple dimensions simultaneously. Like in SQL, elements from Customers, Products and Time can be grouped together. The power of MDX is the ability to run complex expressions on each of the combinations, who are my top 5 Customers/Products/Periods? Who are the poorest? More power is reveled when a subtle change to the MDX is made and the entire expressions now refer to a different Geography, Reseller or Employee. MDX made BI exploration as powerful as it could get.

The second most important element of MDX is the hierarchy manipulations. As BI consumers we constantly move between analyzing highly aggregated values and drilling down to the focus areas. MDX is very good at both. It allows navigation inside big hierarchies with operations like Descendents and Ancestors. Most of the Set Theory operations like Union and Intersect are available and complex rules can be combined to assist users in navigation. An example is “please drill to the products that start with A till F and are manufactures in USA”.

As the semantic layer is becoming richer with metadata information, in many cases the analysis process combines fact table numbers with metadata. The ability to combine both is very powerful and in my opinion this is MDX’s third important element. In SSAS 2005 this is referred to Dimension Attributes and Member Properties. In SAP world it is called Navigational and Display Attributes. No matter what the name is, in MDX it’s fairly the same and powerful combinations can be created. An example would be “Top 5 Customers for each product that is manufactured in the USA and weight over 5 kilos”.

As BI technologies evolve so is MDX. I feel that MDX is standing these days at a crossroad.  Two of the main players that support MDX (Microsoft and SAP) are pushing it to different directions. Each company is interpreting the specification so to minimize its disadvantages, and is adding new sections to show its strength. In any case it would be interesting to see what will MDX next “most powerful” concepts.
We often say though that MDX is just like chess, knowing the rules doesn’t really mean you know how to play….. we made the concept of mastering MDX an art, we invite you to download our product and see how far MDX can be taken.