Introduction

One of the advantages of multidimensional cubes is their rich metadata model backed up with a significant number of MDX functions that enable easy navigation and data retrieval from any part of the cube. We can easily navigate through levels, hierarchies, dimensions, and cubes.

The goal of this chapter is to show common tasks and techniques related to navigation and data retrieval relative to the current context. We will show how to take control of and fine-tune the query context and how to achieve query optimization.

The first three recipes illustrate how to test whether the current context is the one we're expecting or not.

Then we will continue on to two recipes where we illustrate how to find related members, whether the related members are on different hierarchies in the same dimension, or they are from totally different dimensions.

Finally, building on the knowledge of detecting specific members and navigating through any parts of the cube, we run a series of relative calculations...