Querying Your Cube - Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development - page 120

with more than two axes.
Execution complete
Important query concepts
In order to start understanding MDX, there are a few important concepts that you
needtounderstand.Theseareuniquenames,tuples,sets,calculatedmembers,and
functions.
Unique names
Whenever you reference an object in a cube, you can do that by referencing the
unique name of the object. To see what unique names an object has, you can use
SQL Server Management studio.
Finding unique names of objects
1. Open up SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the instance con-
taining the FirstCube database.
2. Press CTRL + N to create a new query.
3. In Metadata Explorer in the query window, drag the Adventure Works
DW2012 cube into the query window.
4. Note the unique name in query window, in this case, [Adventure Works
DW2012] .
5. In Metadata Explorer , drag the Sales Amount measure to the query win-
dow.
6. Note the unique name in the query window, in this case, it is [Meas-
ures].[Sales Amount] .
7. Drag the Customer dimension to the query window.
8. Note the unique name in the query window, in this case, it is [Customer] .
9. Drag the Gender attribute from the Customer dimension to the query win-
dow.
10. Note the unique name in the query window, in this case, it is [Cus-
tomer].[Gender] .