Enhancement: Add the Count of Records with no References to a Many Side Table

[corycundy]

When optimizing models it can be useful to filter the dimension records to only those referenced by a fact table. While that logic can be done in a view or Power Query or a Partition, it would be helpful to see the count of records for tables that are on the one side of a relationship that don't have references to any records on any of the many side relationships. If this number is large or the table is large and the removal of these records would help significantly, it is a fast way to find the need for the optimization. Business requirements might not always allow this optimization, but sometimes they do.

This would likely have to be a Table level attribute and only apply to tables that are on the one side of the relationship. This would be dimensions and not facts in true star schema. It would be great to see this information added within DAX Studio as well.

[marcosqlbi]

It's definitely doable, but my concern is that it could be slow, also very slow on large models.
Thus, it shouldn't be enabled by default, and it shouldn't be part of the "additional statistics information" we already have.
Therefore, we should plan having different level of details in the "advanced" statistics.
I don't think we'll work on that in the short term, but I'll think to implementing the feature the first time we review that area of the library.
Thanks!

[corycundy]

Thanks Marco, That makes sense. I'm also interested in your thoughts on the other enhancement I proposed. Enhancement: Add Refreshed Time and State to Partition Data<#18> Cory Cundy, MCSE: BI Principal Architect - Data Analytics & Data Platform