Chapter 11. Advanced analytics
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Business analysts |
| Data architects | |
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Enterprise architects |
| Application developers |
In this chapter we’ll cover how to do more advanced analytics both inside Mondrian and with external tools. The advanced analytics inside Mondrian, through MDX, meet many use cases. Adventure Works will find many of their common analytics, metrics, and scorecards can be built using these. You can run the MDX examples we present in this chapter; we cover the MDX in more detail than external tools. We’ll also explore some limited “What If” support to allow Mondrian to help you model and think about various scenarios. We’ll then delve into the external tools and briefly cover where Mondrian fits within the Big Data landscape and what tools are often used with Mondrian for data mining. These topics are primarily aimed at the business analyst and enterprise architect.
Mondrian’s query language, MDX, provides a variety of advanced time-based analytics that you can leverage immediately on top of your existing cubes. MDX supports (and makes rather easy) things like “year to date” accumulations, this quarter versus the same quarter last year, percent increase of this quarter over last quarter, and on and on. We’ll explore and build some of these calculations in this section.