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MDX Performance - burdens of IIF

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I used to think naively that IIF is an innocent little function that can only do good and help me make a calculated measure evn faster! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

I found this very helpful article by Mosha Pasumansky

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/mosha/archive/2007/01/29/performance-of-iif-function-in-mdx.aspx

where he urges MDX developers to avoid using IIF function and showing how bad it could be for the performance.

I have rewritten my calculated measures which widely used IIF functions and results in performance gain were very impressive: IIF worsened performance almost in geometric progression:

 

with IIF without IIF 
 
Query 1  5 s 2 s 
Query 2  18 s 8 s 
Query 3  87 s 25 s 


Lesson learned: before writing a calculated member - try to think more about performance...

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