This article explains key terminology used in Jedox Business Rules and describes the operators available in the Rule Editor. It also highlights important differences between Jedox and Excel behavior, especially in relation to operators, comparisons, and the handling of zero and null values.
| Area | An area is a set (or sub-cube) of cells created as a combination (or cross-product) of the elements from all dimension Subsets defining the area. |
| Markers | Part of Jedox OLAP Rules syntax, restricting rule calculation to a reduced set of calculated cells to speed up the process. Marker computation has two phases: the first one is pre-processing made directly after rule modification or value writeback. The second calculation, time phase, benefits from the results prepared in first phase. |
| Sparsity | Ratio of the number of cells with non-null results to the total number of cells in the cube (or area). In real-life databases, this ratio is typically very small, e.g. one value per million cells or even less. |
| Subset | Collection of elements from a single dimension. Contains at least one element. Can be up to the full dimension. |
Operators of the Rule Editor
The following operators can be used in rules: + - * / == != < <= > >= | @
These operator differ from Excel operators in the following ways:
- == means equal to (in Excel = is used); only used in the IF function
- != means not equal to (in Excel <> is used); only used in the IF function
- @ is used only for marker
- | is used for concatenation. For example, instead of using CONCATENATE(“Value 1”, “Value2”), you can use “Value 1” | “Value 2”.
Jedox can store 0 in cubes, as well as treat 0 and null differently in comparison with Excel. For more information, see Storing Zero Values. This feature has impact on arithmetic operations or on the rules using the +, -, * or / operators. For example, for the division by 0, Excel returns #error, while Jedox returns the following:
x/0 or 0/x= 0
x/null or null/x= null
for other numeric value of x:
x/x = 1
Next Step: Comments, Formatting, and Restrictions
Updated March 9, 2026