Currency Conversion in SSAS 2012 (Multidimensional and Tabular)

As defined by the Business Intelligence Wizard in Multidimensional, there are 3 types of currency conversion.

• One-to-many. In this case we store the transactions (for example in the data warehouse) in a single base currency. Even if they originally took place in different countries, we can convert to a single currency in the ETL. The cube or tabular model will then convert to the reporting currencies.
• Many-to-many. Here we store the transactions in the original, different currencies. The cube or tabular model now has (roughly) twice as many calculations that need to be performed. First convert to a single "pivot" currency, and then to the reporting currencies.
• Many-to-one. Again (like many-to-many), we store the transactions in the original, different currencies. However, in this case there is no business requirement to report in different reporting currencies. We just choose not to utilize the ETL to convert to a base currency. Instead, the cube or tabular model is used for this purpose.
The most common of these, in a data warehousing environment at least, is one-to-many.
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