Dynamic MDX in Reporting Services

This post explains how you can build a dynamic MDX query in Reportins Services, customised to the users requirements. This can often bring some quite major performance benefits.

Lets say for example that you want to have a sales report grouped dynamically by either product, sales person, department or customer. Normally you would use a single static MDX query, and then add a dynamic grouping to the table in the report. This is fine, until you try it on a large dataset. If you only have 50 products, 2 salesmen, 5 departments and 100 customers, your MDX needs to return 50,000 records, the report then has to summarise all of this into the level of grouping you want. This renders the pre-calculated aggregations in OLAP pretty much worthless.