A couple of months ago I wrote about how you can use the MDX functions Ancestors() and Ascendants to retrieve the full lineage of members. (See: "MDX: retrieving the entire hierarchy path with Ancestors()".)

As you might recall, the immediate reason to write about those functions was to find a pure MDX solution to implement the "Show Parents" / "Hide Parents" functionality offered by OLAP cube browsers. To recap, developers of MDX-based pivot tables face a challenge when rendering the result of a query like this:

SELECT    CrossJoin(
            [Product].[Product].Members,
 …

A couple of days ago I wrote about one of my forays into MDX land (Retrieving denormalized tabular results with MDX). The topic of that post was how to write MDX so as to retrieve the kind of flat, tabular results one gets from SQL queries. An essential point of that solution was the MDX Ancestor() function.

I stumbled upon the topic of my previous blogpost while I was researching something else entirely. Creating flat tables and looking up individual ancestors is actually a rather specific application of a much more general solution I found initially. Pivot tables and the "Show Parents" functionalityGUI OLAP tools typically offer a pivot table query interface. They let you drag and drop measures and dimension items, like …