Alberto Ferrari
sqlbi.com
Alberto started working with SQL Server in 2000 and immediately his interest focused on Business Intelligence. He and Marco Russo created sqlbi.com, where they publish extensive content about Business Intelligence.
SQLBits 2011
Many-to-Many Relationships in DAX
Deep dive into the handling of many to many relationships in DAX. How to make them work and how to optimize their speed thorugh many patterns and live examples of M2M usage.
The introduction of many to many dimension relationships in SSAS (since 2005) opened new scenarios that can be solved using OLAP cubes. Now, with the introduction of the Vertipaq engine and the DAX programming language, it seems that many-to-many relationships are no longer supported. As we are going to show, this is not true: many-to-many relationships can be leveraged in DAX too, even if this means some deep understanding of the Vertipaq engine and of the DAX programming language. During the session we will show many scenarios where many-to-many relationships can be managed by using DAX. The implementations are different from those used in SSAS, both from the data modeling and from the programming points of view. Gaining the ability to master many-to-many relationships will open new modeling scenarios that look very promising in SSAS.