SOP for using default measures in MDX and SSAS

Question

I'm going through one of the few highly-rated books on MDX, Practical MDX Queries and the book makes heavy use of the fact you can use default measures in MDX. Personally, I don't like this feature and I think whatever amount of keystrokes it saves ultimately isn't worth it. What's the harm in explicitly stating what you're looking from?

select
from
[cube name]

just seems like you're inviting trouble, and it gets worse when you throw something into the slicer. Any other opinions on this?

Answer 1

In some cases you want your MDX query to take into account the changes you made in the cube configuration without rewriting it.

You can still add [dim].[hierarchy].DefaultMember in your slicer but it is useless and makes the query less readable.

Answer 2

In my experience, relying on the default measure is usually bad luck. It's better to be explicit and avoid surprises later.