Creating buckets by comparing Dimension member against Measure using MDX - mdx

Question

I have a Product dimension with hierarchies - product_id, initial_price, product_name and Measures - units_sold, cost_per_unit, revenue_per_unit. For each product_id I need to compare initial_price against revenue_per_unit and then assign it to a bucket based on the comparison.
Consider the following example:
Input:
product_id initial_price revenue_per_unit
1 10 12
2 20 18
3 30 30
Output:
product_id bucket_name
1 Profit
2 Loss
3 Same
How can I achieve this using MDX?

Answer 1

WITH Member [Measures].[Bucket] AS
CASE
WHEN [Measures].[initial_price] < [Measures].[revenue_per_unit] THEN
"Profit"
WHEN [Measures].[initial_price] > [Measures].[revenue_per_unit] THEN
"Loss"
ELSE
"Same"
END
SELECT {[Measures].[Bucket]}
ON COLUMNS,
[Product].[Product Name].Members
ON ROWS
FROM [yourcube]
should deliver what you want. Please note that calculated measures need not return numbers, they also can return strings in MDX (they even can return a string for some cells, and a number for others).
In case you do not have the price available as e. g. an average price on aggregated product level, and want to do the bucketing on product level, the best solution would be not do do that in MDX at all, but in the cube design: Just calculate the bucket on the relational side, and add it as an attribute to the product dimension.
You did not state anything about other dimensions, especially time. In case some other dimensions matter as well to determine the bucket, it might be necessary to add a separate dimension just for the buckets.