Aggregating Many-to-Many Relationships

Relax…this blog is all about Analysis Services and not about polygamy or something worse.

SSAS 2005 went beyond the "classic" OLAP model by introducing flexible dimension-to-measure group relationships, including many-to-many, referenced, fact relationships. M2M relationships can solve some nagging business problems. For example, in a recent project where we had to implement a financial cube, there was a requirement that a G-L account can belong to multiple account groups. This is a classic M2M scenario which can be elegantly solved by introducing a M2M relationship. Adventurizing this, let's take a look at this schema.