Client Tool Curiosities

Had a bit of a weird one the last couple of days where a cube I had built was demonstrating different behaviour in a variety of tools. Debugging the cube script in Visual Studio provided the values that I expected from the script but when I then viewed the same script in ProClarity I had a very different behaviour.

I then tried the same thing in Management Studio and got a different set of numbers and then finally Excel 2007 provided me with a slightly different behaviour. So how did all of this come about. Well firstly there was an error in my calc, I was adding an integer value to a column where null occurred but this wasn’t producing an error in the visual studio debugger. In fact even though the debugger numbers appeared correct it wasn’t evaluating my script in the way I expected.

ProClarity wouldn’t show the error, that was fine but when I put same MDX that ProClarity was generating into Management Studio the correct numbers appeared. Browsing the cube in Management Studio produced a completely different set of values but that was due to me setting filters in the browser rather than navigating to the values I wanted.

Finally I gave Excel 2007 a go and actually saw the error “#VALUE” which kind of gave away what the problem was and where it was.

So there’s a moral to this story in there somewhere which I’ll leave to yourselves. But I’ve taken away from this the saying that if the number looks right and the number smells right then it’s probably right, maybe, in the right type of tool….. perhaps!