About Working with Physical Hierarchies

This topic helps you understand how to set a physical hierarchy's properties and add levels and level columns to a dimension hierarchy.

For more information about setting the physical hierarchy's properties, see What Are a Physical Hierarchy's Properties?

When you import a cube table, Semantic Modeler sets the hierarchy type based on the multidimensional data source. For example, Essbase hierarchies are set to Unbalanced. After you import the cube table, be sure to review each hierarchy's type and change it as needed.

A business transaction, or a cube refresh, can change the number of levels in a parent-child (value) hierarchy. Typically, after you import a cube table, you need to set the hierarchy type for a parent-child (value) hierarchy to Value before you drag metadata to the logical layer. The hierarchy type in the logical layer is set automatically based on the physical hierarchy setting. For all other hierarchies, you can change the hierarchy type later without needing to rebuild the logical model.

When you select columns to add to a hierarchy, be sure to select them in hierarchical order, starting with the highest level. If you select multiple columns to add to the hierarchy as a group, the import adds the group's columns in the order that you selected them. After you add columns to the hierarchy, you can change the order of the columns.

In the physical hierarchy's properties, you can add, remove, or modify the level's columns. By default, the first column you add to the level is the level's key. But you can change the order of the columns and which column is the level key.