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Author Topic: SDMX Query language and MDX  (Read 860 times)

Erik van Ingen - FAO

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SDMX Query language and MDX
« on: December 02, 2010, 06:21:22 AM »
SDMX has its own query language. Has it ever been considered in SDMX to use MDX instead of having its own query language?

An advantage of using MDX in combination with SDMX would be that (1) SDMX would not have the burden of defining its own query language.  (2) MDX is a well known and adopted standard. (3) OLAP systems do not have to implement besides MDX (if they use it), the SDMX query language.

Is anyone using SDMX in combination with MDX?
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Al Hamilton - ABS

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Re: SDMX Query language and MDX
« Reply #1 on: December 06, 2010, 12:54:10 PM »
Hi Erik

At the moment the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) is not working actively on this, but it is a topic of interest to us.  A couple of possible use cases that have been identified are

(1) Exchanging data with other agencies at the national level for whom statistics are a secondary (or tertiary) interest.  Such agencies might view SDMX as "yet another standard" to support for limited business value added overall, but may already be able to support MDX.

(2) Being able to swap between "geospatial" views on statistical data and "dimensional" views on statistical data appears to have been addressed to some extent already in the BI community using MDX as the dimensional representation.  It may not be necessary to establish a separate relationship between the two "views" from first principles to go from SDMX to geospatial views and back again.  We have an investigatory project in this space but have not yet reached detailed consideration of the best way to support dynamic swapping between views for discoverying, selecting, analysing and presenting statistical data content of interest.

By analogy, we've been impressed by one commerical vendor's capabilities for swapping between "time series" and "dimensional" views of data, including supporting SDMX as the dimensional representation.  ABS has an existing, significantly less polished, "pre-SDMX" capability for swapping between dimensional and time series views, but not yet the same capability for swapping dynamically between dimensional and geospatial views of data.

It would be great to be kept in the loop if anyone has looked at SDMX and MDX, or plans to do so.

Best regards

Al 
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