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MDX answer to NextAnalytics challenge

NextAnalytics is a young BI company founded by Ward Yaternick of OLAP@Work fame. He has a blog dedicated to his new product, and while I was reading it, I ran across the post named “Can a business intelligence product be used to answer analytic questions?”. The main premises of this post was that real-life non-trivial calculations are very difficult with traditional BI tools using SQL or MDX, but can be done in much simpler fashion using NextAnalytics product. Ward then gives very concrete example:

That’s the crux of the problem:  The nature of analytics often means that the need evolves.  It’s either because the analytics identified the problem or the analytic led to other questions.  By their nature, analytics are iterative and sequential. For example:

  • I want to see the fastest growing products but it's more complicated than just telling me one measurement.
  • For each region, I want to see which products were growing faster than the rolling six month average, at least six times out of the last N periods.
  • next, again for each region, of those products that were just discovered, which ones grew by more than twenty five percent from the start of the period to the end of the period.
  • I want to know the intersection of those two sets of products across all regions. 
  • By the way, I won’t need these questions answered until next year at this time, although I might change them a bit.
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Tags: mdx

 

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