Level hierarchy column associations

Question

Hi,

I have a question about setting up OBIEE hierarchies.  I'm looking at the SampleApp Lite examples and each level has two columns associated with it.  For example, the "Offices Company" level have Company & Company Key.  My question is why do we need two columns?  Shouldn't the Company column be sufficient since it is used for display as well?

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Another example: you have a fact table that only exist at the Company level.

If you don't add the other columns to the "Offices company" level in the hierarchies but want to use them in an analysis with data from the fact table existing only at the company level you will get an error first.

If then you set the content level in a way to tell OBIEE what to do when you ask a fact at level that it can't answer to it will work again etc.

So put all the columns in the right levels, it will avoid you issues if not today maybe tomorrow or in 6 months

Anything else you look for?

If not maybe can you close the thread? For now it's still This question is Not Answered.

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

You can display as many as you want. The "default" display column when using the "hierarchy" object in a report only show one, but all the others are still there.

And when you use in an analysis these other columns and then maybe mix aggregations levels etc. OBIEE knows that these columns are at that level, so doing a group by there will work as they always have the same values for sub-levels etc.

All the informations you model in the logical layer help OBIEE generating the best possible query.

That's why the model is important, the better you model things and tell OBIEE how things are, the better the queries are (so less issues, less wrong data, less performance problems etc.).

3310714 · Answer

Thanks for your insights!  I have a follow up question on your example.  So by adding "Company Long Name", "Company Address" to the same level, what purposes do these attributes serve?  We can only display one of the attributes to the users to use in Analysis, right?