Panorama Business Intelligence

One of the beautiful features of Panorama NovaView is the ability to manually edit the MDX which expressing the view. In the NovaView desktop application, click on Tools -> Direct MDX. The only problem is that you have to learn MDX yourself…

Here are some useful tips when learning MDX. Even experienced MDX programmers may find interest in these:

• If you were a code programmer in your past, you can relax: MDX don’t care about capitalization.
• Don’t even try to skip an axis: It’s impossible and it is meaningless. Use the predefined names for the axis, such as: columns, rows, pages, etc.
• You’re new to MDX and the whole OLAP gives you a headache? Try to imagine this as a hypercube. It can help you a lot.
• When writing large queries, pay attention to the “readability” of your MDX. Use the Monospace fonts whenever possible.
• Do NOT think of SQL when learning or working with MDX. Although the syntaxes may look alike, these languages are totally different when you get to know them.
• .Members will give you all regular members. .AllMembers will also include calculated members.
• An expression like [Time].Members won’t work if the Time dimension has multiple hierarchies.
• The asterisk (*) can replace the CrossJoin function. It may improve readability of the code.
• When using Order() function, you can specify a sorting criteria which is not shown in the result grid.