Russo Marco, Ferrari Alberto. The Many-to-Many Revolution. Advanced dimensional modeling with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services

Whitepaper. Published: Version 2.0 Revision 1 — October 10, 2011.This paper describes how to leverage the many-to­-many dimension relationships, a feature that debuted available with Analysis Services 2005 and is now available by using DAX in the new BISM Tabular available in Analysis Services “Denali”. After introducing the main concepts, the paper discusses various implementation techniques in the form of design patterns: for each model, there is a description of a business scenario that could benefit from the model, followed by an explanation of its implementation.A separate download contains SQL Server database and Analysis Services projects with the same sample data used in this paper. BISM Tabular examples are available as PowerPivot for Excel workbooks.