Anything is possible with MDX

I was with one of my favourite customers last week and had an impromptu challenge put before me. We had a cube containing the company's sales data and the challenge was to reproduce a report they had created in their legacy system. (I found out later that this report had taken a couple of months to produce.) The requirement was to create a report that would display the last 7 days of a particular outlet and for each day show the sales and transactions for the top hour of that day.

I have often been quoted as saying that if the data is in the cube, one MDX query can answer any question that you might have. So the pressure was on to create the report. Fortunately, they were using ReportPortal software, which is a highly functional thin client tool, and it has good charting capability. The web browser tool allows you to create your own sets and calculated members. So all I really needed to do was create a set for the last 7 days. I will reproduce a similar query using my weblog database, which has comparable dimensions.