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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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Optimizing High Cardinality Columns in VertiPaq

Marco Russo

VertiPaq is the internal column-based database engine used by PowerPivot and BISM Tabular models. High cardinality columns might be the more expensive parts of a table. If you cannot remove a high cardinality column from a table, by using the techniques described in this article you might optimize its storage saving up to more than 90% of original space.

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Budget and Other Data at Different Granularities in PowerPivot

Marco Russo

PowerPivot and BISM Tabular handle relationships between tables by using a single column that requires to be a unique column in the lookup table. In this article you will see how to handle relationships between tables that have different granularities, which is a typical scenario whenever you have a monthly budget table and a daily level sales table.

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