AS2008 MDX: subselects and CREATE SUBCUBE in non-visual mode

There were not very many changes to MDX syntax in AS2008, and Vidas Matelis described most of them in his blog here (for his list of all changes in AS2008 check this blog entry). I just noticed that there is at least one more change which Vidas didn’t include, but which is somewhat important: ability to define CREATE SUBCUBE and subselects in non visual mode.

To understand this, we need to understand what CREATE SUBCUBE does. It really does two things:

1. Implicit Exists between the set in CREATE SUBCUBE and query axis, query named sets including top level set functions (for more details see blog "Slicer and axis interaction in MDX Part 2 - Implicit Exists" – even though it talks about WHERE clause, everything from that entry equally applies to subselects and CREATE SUBCUBE as well)

2. Applies visual totals to the values of physical measures even within expressions if there are no coordinate overwrites.

Let’s look into this deeper. Consider the following example: