Advanced Dimension Design - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 332

Unary
Operator

Description

The value is multiplied by N and added to the aggregate values.
N can be any numeric value (typically N is between 0 and 1).

N

An empty unary operator is equivalent to "+."

A business scenario commonly used to demonstrate the usefulness of rollups
using unary operators is the case where Net Income equals Sales minus Cost
of Goods Sold. As for the calculation of tax at different rates depending on tax
bracket, that will come a little later because calculating those values will re-
quire custom rollups, and for now the topic of discussion is the unary operat-
or. In this example, Sales figures will be added, hence the "+" operator is
used, and for Cost of Goods Sold, which is subtracted, the "−" operator is
used. Were depreciation included in the following example, given that it is a
non-cash expense, you might choose to ignore it in the hierarchy by using the
tilde (~) unary operator. Follow the steps below to set up unary operators for
the parent-child hierarchies in the Account and Organization dimensions.
1. Open the Account dimension and click the Accounts hierarchy. In the
Properties window you will see the properties associated with parent-
child hierarchies under a section called Parent-Child, as shown in
Figure 8-10 . Click the drop-down list box next to UnaryOperator-
Column and select New.

Figure 8-10

2. In the Object Binding dialog select Operator as the column, as
shown in Figure 8-11 .