MDX Solutions: With Microsoft® SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion® Essbase, Second Edition

Appendix C. Intrinsic Cell and Member Properties

OLE DB for OLAP gives you the ability to treat the members and cells returned by queries as groups of related properties. This enables multiple related pieces of information to be returned to a client for both members and cells. If you do not request specific cell or member properties in a query, then a default set is returned. This appendix provides a reference to aid you in specifying the properties in MDX queries. (You may also wish to refer to the documentation for OLE DB for OLAP or ADO MD or ADOMD.NET for programmer-level information on how to extract and use the returned property information.)

When you are considering the use of member properties, it is important that you recognize that Microsoft Analysis Services does not make a syntactic distinction between intrinsic member properties and properties that you define (which might otherwise be called "member attributes" or "related attributes"). This means that you should avoid creating member properties whose names collide with those of the intrinsic member properties. In Microsoft's OLAP products, you do not have the ability to define custom cell properties, so this is not yet a consideration for cell properties.

The main purpose of the cell properties supported in Microsoft's OLAP/Analysis Services is to assist in the rendering of cells. Client tools that look for these properties will be able to render results as these properties specify, whereas other clients will not. If ...