Get Rid of those Distinct Count Blues

Do you have the case of the distinct count blues? Too many rows in your fact table to do a distinct count? Are your resources overwhelmed by the distinct count process?

No worries...SQL2005 to the rescue! Take advantage of the many-to-many relationship capabilities of SQL2005 to do counts on your dimension table instead of the usual distinct count on your fact table. Read more about the many-to-many distinct count from Marco Russo's white paper. Thanks Marco for your insights.
With this alternative method, you gain maximum performance.
Implementing is easy too:
1. Create a measure group on your dimension (e.g. Customer, Product) with a simple row count and not a distinct count
2. Define the M-M relationships in your Dimension Usage
And that's it!

I am so excited about SQL2005 and how you can now solve such business problems which were almost impossible in SQL2000.