Please add more MDX functions

While Cognos does have a number of MDX functions, a few important functions are missing. While it is possible to find workarounds for the missing functions, these are invariably less performant than using the native functions.

With the possible exception of Powercubes, nearly every OLAP products implements these functions.

Top of my wishlist

1. ascendants - Cognos has descendants, why not ascendants? in TM1 and Essbase this is the anscestors function, in SSAS it's ascendants.

2. descendants(set,#, leaves) - This is especially important for ragged or parent/child hierarchies. Right now in order to get the members from the lowest level you need an unholy combination of intersect and generate or filter and count. OR you need to beg/bribe the cube architect to add an isLeaf property, but that would still require using the filter on the entire hierarchy. It's ugly and slow. or bribe them to make a subset, and then do an intersect on the set you're working with, but that's also ugly.

3. hierarchize(set,post) - hierarchize does exist in Cognos, but it doesn't officially support the post flag (protip for anyone reading - it usually does work).

4. currentOrdinal - a quick and easy way of knowing the numeric position of each member in a set would be LOVELY. I'm not sure if this exists in TM1 or Essbase.

Even just the first two would make many tasks significantly easier, and since the functions already exist in TM1, Essbase, and SSAS, it should be relatively easy to add them for those cubes.