What issues arise when referential integrity is broken?

< 1 min read

When referential integrity is broken, foreign keys in fact data don’t find matching dimension records.
In my dashboard, some transactions showed under a blank customer in visuals.
Slicers didn’t filter those rows, so totals differed between visuals.
COUNT DISTINCT and category-wise revenue became inaccurate.
Power BI created “(Blank)” members which confused business users.
Relationships also triggered model warnings during refresh.
Drill-down analysis failed because hierarchy values were missing.
We fixed it by data validation rules and adding an “Unknown” dimension row.
After correction, filtering and aggregations became consistent across reports.

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