About Varying Attributes

A product typically has attributes that describe or define the product. For example, a product could have an attribute describing the size of the product in ounces and an attribute describing the flavor of the product. In such a scenario, Product would be a base dimension while Ounces and Flavor would be attribute dimensions.

Note:

For a full explanation of base dimensions and attribute dimensions, see the Oracle Essbase Database Administrator's Guide.

A varying attribute enables you to track two values in relation to a third dimension called an independent dimension. You could, for example, track your product in eight ounces over a year. In this scenario, Time is the independent dimension. The value of this third factor can vary (hence the name). For example, you could track your product over a year, a quarter, or a month.

Note:

There are two types of independent dimensions: continuous and discrete. The members in a continuous dimension reflect continuity. For example, week, month, and quarter reflect the continuity in a time dimension. The members in a discrete dimension do not imply continuity. For example, California, Texas, and Ohio in a market dimension do not have a relationship based on continuity.

As another example, consider this scenario: The sales representative for a client changes in midyear. Customer sales totals and sales representative assignments over six months are as follows:

Table 2. Varying Attribute Example: Sales Representative Changing Over Time

March	April	May	June	July	August
4000	6000	2000	1000	1000	7000
Jones	Jones	Jones	Smith	Smith	Smith

In this example, Sales Representative is the varying attribute. Data retrievals show that the sales representative Jones sold the customer a total of $12,000 worth of products from March through May and the sales representative Smith then sold a total of $9,000 worth of products to the customer from June through August. Without the use of the varying attribute, the only known sales representative would be the current representative Smith to whom all sales ($21,000) would be credited.

Varying attributes offer alternate ways of grouping your members. For example, you can use color to group SKUs. In this scenario, the attribute dimension “Color” is associated with SUBSKU:

Product_H
   |
   |__Family
   |  |
   |  |__SKU
   |     |
   |     |__SUBSKU
   |  
   |_Color
      |
      |__SUBSKU

When Color is set as a varying attribute, the retrieval results would be similar to the following table:

Table 3. Retrieval Results for SUBSKU and SKU for the Above Example

SUBSKU	SKU
Red	100
White	400
White	600
Black	200
Black	300
Silver	500

Varying attributes must meet the following guidelines:

They must have multiple chains.
Leaf levels must match.

You can enable an outline to support varying attributes. You can define attribute dimensions to function as varying attributes. You can also edit varying attributes to reflect the type of information you need.

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