Performance Management Architect enables you to manage and share dimensions across applications as well as use independent dimensions that are unique to your application. You can also change a dimension within an application from shared to local or vice versa. This capability provides a deployed application the flexibility to modify its dimension sharing requirements with other applications over time without having to define them at the time of application creation.

You can create local dimensions and maintain the dimensions locally in the application. At a subsequent time, you can decide to share these local dimensions (converting from local to shared) or copy them to the Shared Library as separate dimensions for independent use by other applications. Once a dimension is in the Shared Library, you can distribute updates to other applications that use the dimension in several ways (inherited using a shared dimension or explicitly using dimension synchronization to move changes between the Shared Library and an application).

Detaching dimensions (converting from shared to local) enables you to break the shared link between the dimension in the Shared Library and its counterpart in an application while allowing you to retain the same dimension structure and property values in the application. Any changes made to the dimension in the Shared Library are then no longer automatically inherited to the application.