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Relationships can be created easily in a tabular model. In the previous chapter, you saw that there are multiple kinds of relationships between measure groups and dimensions such as regular, referenced, fact, and so on. However, creating relationships in the tabular mode is as simple as a database relationship. This simplicity when creating relationships and also in other parts of tabular development is the main reason why a tabular model can be developed easier and faster than multidimensional. Steps 1 to 3 showed you how to add new tables into the tabular model and create or edit relationships. Only the one-to-many relationship is supported in the tabular model, but you can create many-to-many relationships with intermediate tables.

As you saw in the previous example, hierarchies can only be created from columns of a single table. As a result, if you want to create a hierarchy from multiple tables, you can use calculated columns. In this example, you saw how we created calculated columns in the product table that shows the corresponding category or subcategory value from the related tables. For creating those columns, a DAX function named RELATED is used; this function will get data from the related table's column (shown in steps 5 and 6).

After creating new calculated columns, there is no need to have two new tables from the user's point of view, so we make them hidden by just changing the hidden properties of those tables to true (step 7). We can also hide columns in each table as required.

Step 8 shows a method that is similar to the method in the previous example, same as the previous example for creating a hierarchy; it just uses columns of the product table to create a hierarchy of product categories.