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Asked: 2026-05-23T12:42:25+00:00

I’ve run into some confusing behavior in Analysis Services 2005 (and 2008 R2) and

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I’ve run into some confusing behavior in Analysis Services 2005 (and 2008 R2) and would appreciate it if someone could explain why this is happening. For the sake of this question, I’ve reproduced the behavior against the Adventure Works cube.

Given this MDX:

SELECT [Customer].[Education].[(All)].ALLMEMBERS ON COLUMNS,
    Order(DrillDownLevel({[Customer].[Customer Geography].[All Customers]}), 
          ([Measures].[Internet Order Count]), 
          ASC) ON ROWS
FROM (SELECT {[Customer].[Education].&[Partial High School]} ON COLUMNS FROM [Adventure Works])
WHERE [Measures].[Internet Order Count];

The query evaluates with the ordered set on rows:
All Customers: 2, 136
Germany: 269
France: 298
Canada: 304
United Kingdom: 311
United States: 457
Australia: 497

However, if I include the All Member (or defaultmember) for Education in the tuple used in the order statement:

SELECT [Customer].[Education].[(All)].ALLMEMBERS ON COLUMNS,
        Order(DrillDownLevel({[Customer].[Customer Geography].[All Customers]}), 
              ([Measures].[Internet Order Count], [Customer].[Education].[All Customers]), 
              ASC) ON ROWS
FROM (SELECT {[Customer].[Education].&[Partial High School]} ON COLUMNS FROM [Adventure Works])
WHERE [Measures].[Internet Order Count];

Then the the set comes back in a significantly different order:
All Customers: 2, 136
France: 298
Germany: 269
United Kingdom: 311
Canada: 304
Australia: 497
United States: 459

Note that France and Germany are out of order relative to each other. Same with Canada / UK and with USA / Australia. From what I can tell, it’s ordering based on the aggregation before the sub-cube is evaluated.

Why does including this member (which should implicitly be in the tuple in the first example?) cause the evaluation of the order statement to look outside of the subcube’s visual totals? Filter and TopCount etc functions seem to have the same behavior.

Cheers.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Note: Have a look at http://www.bp-msbi.com/2011/07/mdx-subselects-some-insight/ where I explained the behaviour in more detail.

    A great article about subselects is Mosha’s 2008 MDX: subselects and CREATE SUBCUBE in non-visual mode

    Note what happens when you use a subselect. Implicit Exists and visual totals are applied. The key bit of information here in regards to what you are experiencing is:

    2. Applies visual totals to the values of physical measures even within expressions if there are no coordinate overwrites.

    In your first query SSAS applies visual totals by default. You can change your query to not do this like this:

    SELECT [Customer].[Education].[(All)].ALLMEMBERS ON COLUMNS,
    Order(DrillDownLevel({[Customer].[Customer Geography].[All Customers]}), 
          ([Measures].[Internet Order Count]), 
          ASC) ON ROWS
FROM NON VISUAL (SELECT {[Customer].[Education].&[Partial High School]} ON COLUMNS FROM [Adventure Works])
WHERE [Measures].[Internet Order Count];

    The NON VISUAL keyword in a SELECT statement tells SSAS to only apply the implicit Exists, but not the visual totals part. The results of the query will be the same as in the second case, but you will also see the real numbers it is ordering by.

    Because you are explicitly overwriting the All member in the second query, SSAS does not apply the visual totals to this expression and orders by the total amounts for all years. However, it still displays the visual totals for the selected on ROWS measure after it evaluates the order on non-visual totals.

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