Introduction to MDX - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 97

[Product].[Product Line].[Mountain],
[Customer].[Country].[Australia])
You can see from this query that you are selecting the Measures.[Internet
Sales Amount] value from the Adventure Works cube based on a specific
condition mentioned in the WHERE section of the MDX query. This condition
specified in the WHERE clause uniquely identifies the cell. All you have done
in the condition is to list the members (which you learned about in the previ-
ous section) that uniquely identify the cell, separated by commas. An MDX
expression like this that uniquely identifies a cell is called a tuple.
Tuples
As you saw in the previous section, a tuple uniquely identifies a cell or a sec-
tion of a cube. A tuple is represented by one member from each dimension,
separated by a comma, and is enclosed within the parentheses characters, (
and ). A tuple does not necessarily have to explicitly contain members from
all the dimensions in the cube. Some examples of tuples based on the Ad-
venture Works cube are
1. ([Customer].[Country].[Australia])
2. ([Date].[Calendar].[2004].[H1 CY 2004].[Q1 CY 2004], [Cus-
tomer].[Country].[Australia])
3. ([Date].[Calendar].[2004].[H1 CY 2004].[Q1 CY 2004],
[Product].[Product Line].[Mountain], [Customer].[Country].[Australia])
In the preceding examples, Tuples 1 and 2 do not contain members from all
the dimensions in the cube. Therefore they represent sections of the cube. A
section of the cube represented by a tuple is called a slice since you are sli-
cing the cube to form a section (slice) based on certain dimension members.
When you refer to tuple ([Customer].[Country].[Australia]) you actually refer to
the sixteen cells that correspond to the country Australia for the example
shown in Figure 3-4 (the cells in the front face of the cube). Therefore when
you retrieve the data held by the cell pointed to by this tuple you are actually
retrieving the Internet Sales Amount of all the customers in Australia. The In-
ternet Sales Amount value for the tuple ([Customer].[Country].[Australia]) is