Varying Attributes Overview

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.

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.

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:

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 using 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 in Essbase Studio, the retrieval results would be similar to the following table:

Varying attributes must have multiple chains, and the leaf levels must match.