Understanding Circular Dependencies in Tabular and PowerPivot

When you design a data model for Tabular you should pay attention to a though topic, which is that of circular dependencies in formulas. It is very important to learn how to handle circular dependencies now because in SQL 2012 (and in PowerPivot 2012) there will be a stronger validation of circular dependencies. Some of the checks described in this article have been introduced with the release RC0 of SQL Server 2012 and were not present before. Thus, you might author formulas in previous versions of SQL 2012 (or PowerPivot) and end up with a non-working solution when the final bits will be available, due to these additional (and perfectly understandable) constraints.