Hi

I'm new to MDX but not so new to MS OLAP. First thing, if anyone can
help, is:

Is there a decent MDX utility available shareware/trialware anywhere?
The bundled MDX Sample Application is dreadful. Tiny font, confusing
syntax error messages, and no real documentation. (In fact I can't
find decent MDX documentation anywhere. Thinking of getting George
Spofford's book - does it include a decent editor on a CD?)

Second thing may just be a feature of the MDX sample utility. All of
my dimensions seem to have a defaulty-looking hierarchy added to them.
For example, I define a dimension with these levels:

LA (ALL level, with caption set to "All LAs". I didn't add this level
in, it was just there when I created the dimension in Editor)
LA (leaf level)

MDX Sample Utility displays the dimension like this:

LA (dimension name)
(All)
All LAs[list of members]
LA[list of members]

Weird. Is this
a) my mistake in dimension design? I can't think how, because even for
a simple "one ALL level, one leaf level" dimension like this I can't
create a dimension without creating a level (get an error message in
Editor). And this dimension (and other, more complicated ones) work
exactly as I want when I look at the data.
b) MDX Sample Utility just being weird? It's pretty weird in other
respects...
c) MDX SU giving some indication of the syntactical possibilities for
referring to members of the dimension?
d) Something else even stranger that I haven't thought of?

thanks for any help

cheers


Seb

George Spofford's book on AS2000 comes with a trial version of MdxBuilder
2.0, but we don't support the product anymore.

Elad

<sebthirlway (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote