Best Practices: Letting SAS Enterprise Guide Write MDX Code

This post was kindly contributed by Business Intelligence Notes for SAS BI Users - go there to comment and to read the full post.

SAS Enterprise Guide is a VERY useful client tool for SAS development and data analysis.  One the best features is the ability to see the SAS code generated from different tasks.  In addition to viewing the Base SAS code used to perform different tasks, you can also view MDX code written to create certain measures, members, and sets in OLAP Cubes.

Adding Simple Measures from SAS Enterprise Guide

Let’s start by creating a simple measure for a Rolling 3 Months of Sales using my SGF2011 cube:

Creating a New Custom Measure

Create a time series measure:

First Step of Creating a Time Series Measures

Enter the parameters:

Parameters for Rolling 3 Month Measure

Specify the format:

Formatting the Custom Measure

The next screen summarizes the parameters entered into this wizard. You can see the MDX written here as well.  Click ‘Finish’ to define the measure.

You should see the measure in your cube output.  Right click anywhere on the grid output to ‘Edit View’ > ‘Edit with MDX Editor’.

Editing OLAP Cube with MDX Editor

This is the output you should see in the MDX Editor:

MDX Editor

The measure can then be defined in the cube globally by putting the MDX code in the SAS program which builds the cube (if applicable) or through SAS OLAP Cube Studio.  This same method can be used to view the MDX code generated for custom members and sets.

On a more general note, if you want to learn MDX, you can use SAS Enterprise Guide to learn basic MDX syntax by manipulating a cube and viewing the MDX code generated.  If you need some help getting started with OLAP – in the To Write or not Write OLAP Code  post I talk more about writing OLAP cubes.

This post was kindly contributed by Business Intelligence Notes for SAS BI Users - go there to comment and to read the full post.