What is 'MDX Missing Members Mode' in Analysis Services 2005 ?
There were many enhancements in Analysis Services 2000 to make MDX closer to SQL, both syntactically and semantically. After all, UDM is the model for both relational reporting and multidimensional analysis, and in order to support relational reporting style queries, UDM and MDX must be able to express relational semantics. One of the areas where MDX and SQL were very different was the question of how to treat missing or non-existing attribute values. Indeed, let's consider the following SQL query
SELECT City, SUM(Sales) FROM Sales WHERE City = 'Redmond' OR City = 'Leningrad' GROUP BY City
It can be translated into the following MDX query
SELECT {Measures.Sales} ON COLUMNS, {City.Redmond, City.Leningrad} ON ROWS FROM Sales
Tags: mdx