Forum Discussion
Solved
DAX vs MDX
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using DAX instead of MDX in SSRS (with tabular cubes)?
There are no real disadvantages to using DAX against a tabular model. DAX is the native expression language for tabular models. But there are a couple of disadvantages to using MDX
- MDX has different semantics, so there are extra steps that need to be done when a tabular model evaluates an MDX query that are not needed when evaluating DAX - resulting in slower performance
- MDX returns multi-dimensional cellsets which have to go through a process called flattening to be consumed by SSRS which also adds extra overhead.
2 Replies
Thank you!
There are no real disadvantages to using DAX against a tabular model. DAX is the native expression language for tabular models. But there are a couple of disadvantages to using MDX
- MDX has different semantics, so there are extra steps that need to be done when a tabular model evaluates an MDX query that are not needed when evaluating DAX - resulting in slower performance
- MDX returns multi-dimensional cellsets which have to go through a process called flattening to be consumed by SSRS which also adds extra overhead.
