[Mondrian] proposal for Order function with key specification list

John V. Sichi jsichi at gmail.com
Fri Sep 5 18:04:40 EDT 2008


Julian Hyde wrote:
> Not so fast. You, a SQL guy, might infer that order is unspecified, but a
> lisp guy (or girl) would not. They don't specify that <Hierarchy>.Members
> returns the members in order, but every MDX user assumes that.
> 
> The Microsoft online documentation is not canon. Actually, there is no canon
> for MDX. I would seek a second opinion from one of the better MDX books
> (e.g. George Spofford, Mosha Pasumansky) and see what they say about the
> ordering of various functions.
> 
> And the fact that they introduced Unorder is an indication that elsewhere in
> MDX, order matters.

Right, MDX is more talmudic than canonical.

I'm fine with any of the options; I'm just hoping to see a guideline 
declared for Mondrian developers to follow and users to rely on.

(The fact that some of the functions in the MS docs, such as CrossJoin, 
*do* explicitly declare order preservation rules is what led me to my 
inference regarding the status quo, but I'm happy to replace it with 
"status quo:  Wild West".)

JVS




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