MDAC 2.5 SDK - OLE DB Programmer's Reference
Chapter 24: Multidimensional Expressions
After establishing a connection and getting an interface on the session object, the consumer has to specify a query. Execution of a query results in a dataset. All data in a multidimensional data store exists as value points in one or more n-dimensional cubes. The result of a user query encompasses one or more cubes and extracts a set of points from these cubes as another p-dimensional cube. The value of p is usually no more than 4 and is typically 2 or 3. The resulting p-dimensional cube is called a dataset. This is similar to a query in a relational database system where the query encompasses one or more tables and returns a result set that has the same structure as that of a table.
The dataset itself looks like a cube, but the dimensions of the dataset are called axes. Each axis consists of one or more dimensions projected on it. For a more complete description of the dataset, see Datasets.