Limiting the query output
MDX supports multiple ways of limiting query results. You could use the WHERE clause, often referred to as slicer, since it limits the result set by specifying a data slice. You could also use the FILTER function to specify the criteria for members included on each axis and thereby derive a more focused result set.
While reviewing the results of queries, as shown in the previous section, you probably noticed that the result sets included some empty cells. As you might imagine, large cubes could include many empty cells, and such data may or may not be desirable in the query's output. You have a couple of options for limiting the output to only non-null (non-empty) values.
How to do it...
Let's get started with limiting the query output.
Execute the following queries to limit the output to only the components product category. As mentioned earlier, we can refer to a hierarchy member by its name or by its key, so either of the following statements will return the same...
