In September 2006 I had announced in this blog the release of the first version of The Many-to-Many Revolution, a whitepaper that describes how to leverage the many-to-many dimension relationships feature that had being available since Analysis Services 2005. The paper contains many generic patterns that can be applied in many common data analysis’ scenarios.

More than 5 years later and more then 20.000 unique people that downloaded the 1.0 paper, I am proud to announce that we released

The Many-to-Many Revolution 2.0.

These are the news in this edition:

  • Alberto Ferrari joined me as co-author of the paper
  • We added a new pattern for BISM Multidimensional (formerly known as UDM)
  • We translated several existing pattern to BISM Tabular model.
    • Because BISM Tabular doesn’t support many-to-many relationships in its data model, you have to rely on DAX formulas to obtain the desired results. This produces many changes in data modeling and we tried to cover these differences in the paper, too

The paper is freely available in PDF format. We will publish single patterns described in the paper as web articles, in order to improve readability and indexing from search engines (today everybody use a web search engine instead than looking for a document in local disk, just because it’s faster).

If you are willing to watch a one-hour session about a few of the BISM Tabular models described in the paper, I suggest you to look at the Many-to-Many Relationships in DAX session that Alberto held in Liverpool at SQLBits 9 two months ago. Yes, the paper has much more details and model,  but you can start with the video and then study on the paper!

We look forward to get your feedback!