Many-to-Many relationships in PowerPivot

Written by Marco Russo

Monday, 07 December 2009 16:07

PowerPivot doesn’t have the capability of really understand a many-to-many (M2M) relationship between two tables. In a relational world, a many-to-many relationship is materialized using a bridge table that split this relationship in two separate one-to-many relationships between the two original tables and the bridge table. Apparently, we can do the same in PowerPivot, but the behavior is not the expected one. Some workaround is possible using DAX, but there are some undesirable side effects if we only use calculated column. As we will see, it is necessary to use calculated measures to get the best results.

Consider two tables, Customers and Accounts.