Business Intelligence Tutorial

Lesson 22. Defining hierarchies

In this lesson, you will create a hierarchy in one of the dimensions. Hierarchies organize parent-child relationships among the columns of a dimension and are displayed as a tree structure. For example, in the Time dimension, you might define the Year member as the top of the hierarchy. The Quarter member would be a child of Year, and Month would be a child of Quarter.

Creating hierarchies

In this exercise, you will create a hierarchy in the Markets dimension.

1. Select the Market dimension in the field on the left side of the Define Hierarchy page and click Add Hierarchy. The Add Hierarchy window is displayed.
2. In the Name field, type Region-City exactly as shown here (without spaces) and click Done. Notice that columns in the Market dimension are now displayed in the Dimension Columns field on Define Hierarchy page.
3. Select the Region column in the Dimension Columns field and click the right arrow button. The Region column is added to the Parent/Child Relationship field.
4. Select the City column and click the right arrow button. The City column is displayed as a child of Region column in the Parent/Child Relationship field. The window looks like this:
   
   
5. Click Next and the Preview Hierarchies page is displayed.

Previewing hierarchies

In this exercise, after you have created all the hierarchies you want, you can see what kind of data they will present in the Preview Hierarchies page.

1. Open the tree structure for the Market dimension in the Hierarchy List by Dimension field.
2. Click Region-City and a sample Market outline appears in the Essbase Outline Hierarchies field. The window looks like this:
   
   
3. Click Next and the final window of the OLAP Model Assistant is displayed.

What you just did

In this lesson, you created and reviewed a hierarchy in the Market dimension.