Scope vs value assignment

Question

Can someone explain to me the difference (if any) between these two mdx statements? I'm trying to determine if one is better than the one in terms of performance.

This:

Scope([Measures].[Sales Amount]);
    FORMAT_STRING(this) = "#,##0.00";
End Scope;

Or this:

FORMAT_STRING([Measures].[Sales Amount]) = "#,##0.00";

Is there any difference between these two statements?

Answer 1

 Hi David,

 One noticeable difference can be

 what if you have an account dimension and Member in that dimension called "Expenses". Now you want to apply this format only to Expenses member and no other dimension or members.So using scope you can achieve something like this...

 Scope([Measures].[Sales Amount], {[Account].[Account].&[Expenses]});
    FORMAT_STRING(this) = "#,##0.00";
End Scope;

So the above would be scoping around [Sales Amount] and Expenses member.

 But you cannot use it for

FORMAT_STRING([Measures].[Sales Amount],{[Account].[Account].&[Expenses]}) = "#,##0.00";

I don't think the above is possible.

Regards

 Gokul

Answer 2

Actually I was only wondering about that specific case where you scope only on a measure and assign it a value (or in my case a dynamic format_string).

All examples I see on the web use a scope statement but it seems to me that a direct assignment (as in my second example) does exactly the same thing.  Now since I only saw examples using a scope statement, I was wondering if there is not something I was missing. Performance or behavior wise.

Answer 3

Hi David,

In your case, the 2 approaches doesn't have difference in performance because they don't have different calculation space. Please refer to this white paper http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17303 to learn more relevant information.

Regards,
Jerry