Introduction

This chapter contains some of the more advanced MDX topics.

Here we'll learn how to isolate and display members without children, how to isolate members with data in parent-child hierarchies, how to display their individual values, and other useful information regarding unbalanced hierarchies. Unbalanced hierarchies are hierarchies that appear to have holes inside their dimensional structure and can have missing members from the bottom up.

Next, we're going to learn how to deal with randomness. We're going to show how to display random numbers, how to work with random samples from a hierarchy, and how to get random samples from a random hierarchy. Because the samples are random in nature, we can use a single report to show different information. Such reports can be used for monitoring purposes.

We'll close the chapter with two complex recipes. The first one explains how to perform multiple sorts or how to use several conditions in order to sort members of a hierarchy. The second...