Using MDX to browse the file system

One very obscure feature of Analysis Services that I’ve only ever seen documented in the books “Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005” and its successor “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed” (both highly recommended for advanced SSAS users, by the way) is the fact that you can use MDX to browse the file system of the server that Analysis Services is running on, with some restrictions. Full details on this can be found on P804 of the 2008 book but it neglects to give any real examples of how to do it, so since it took me a few minutes to work out the correct syntax to use I thought it was worth a blog post.

There are four MDX extensions you can use, which can be executed from SQL Management Studio just like any other MDX statement.