SSAS MemberNamesUnique Property

Reposted from Thomas Ivarsson blog with the author's permission.

In the SSAS newsgroup there was a question about removing the & character that will appear when you work with attributes in Management Studio/directly in MDX.

The reason why the & character appears is about the MemberNamesUnique-property of the dimension attribute that you can find in BIDS here. That property is set to false as a default and that is why you will see the & before the attribute in the MDX code.

I have choosed to use the Sales Reason dimension in the Adventure Works demo cube and the Sales Reason Type attribute since it only has a few members.

In the Adventure Works cube I have changed that property to false in the two last examples when you drag an attribute member to the MDX query window in Management Studio.

The two first examples(1-2) shows the default behaviour, MemberNamesUnique = False. The two last(3-4) what will happen if you set that to True.

1.   [Sales Reason].[Sales Reason Type].&[Promotion]
2.   [Sales Reason].[Sales Reason Type].&[Other]
3.   [Sales Reason].[Sales Reason Type].[Marketing]
4.   [Sales Reason].[Sales Reason Type].[Other]

I would recommend you to keep the default behaviour with that property set to False because it is harder to have unique member names than key.  City names in Uinited States are not unique on the country level.