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The Many-to-Many Revolution 2.0

Marco Russo + Alberto Ferrari

SQL Server Analysis Services introduced modeling many-to-many relationships between dimensions in version 2005. At a first glance, we may tend to underestimate the importance of this feature: after all, many other OLAP engines do not offer many-to-many relationships. Yet, this lack did not limit their adoption and, apparently, only a few businesses really require it.

The SQL Server Analysis Services version that will be released in 2012 (currently codenamed “Denali”) will introduce a new modeling (BISM, Business Intelligence Semantic Model) choice that is called “BISM Tabular” and will rename the former UDM (Unified Dimensional Model) to “BISM Multidimensional”.

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Order of Evaluation in CALCULATE Parameters

Marco Russo

DAX is the new language used by PowerPivot and Analysis Services in Tabular mode and it resembles the syntax of Excel formula and it can be considered a functional language. You do not have iterative statements, but you can run iterative functions like, for example, SUMX and FILTER. The most important functions in DAX are CALCULATE and CALCULATETABLE, and these functions are also the most complex to master, because of the many operations they do. Read more »

Clever Hierarchy Handling in DAX

Alberto Ferrari

Hierarchy handling in DAX is not very easy, due to the fact that hierarchies, unlike it was in MDX, are not first-class citizens in the DAX world. While hierarchies can be easily defined in the data model, there are no DAX functions that let you access, for example, the parent of the CurrentMember. Well, to tell the truth, there is no concept of CurrentMember in DAX either. Read more »

Incremental Processing in Tabular Using Process Add

Marco Russo

In Analysis Services 2012 you can process a table in a Tabular model by several ways: you can process the whole table, you can split the table in several partitions and process a single partition, you can merge partitions and you can incrementally process a single partition by using ProcessAdd, which is the topic of this article.

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