Ragged and unbalanced hierarchies are those in which data are not uniformly present for all levels in every branch of the data tree. For instance, most Sales Representatives in a hypothetical database would report to a Sales Executive, but in some smaller marketing territories, there may be Representatives without a Sales Executive, who report directly to the next higher level.
When multidimensional cubes are imported from OLAP Cube data sources, hierarchies are assumed to be balanced (complete at all levels) unless otherwise specified. The setting to control whether a cube hierarchy is either ragged or unbalanced is a property of the physical Dimension object created during cube import.
To reach the setting, take the following actions in Strategy Developer 9.x:
When enabled, the setting alters MDX generation for reports using attributes within the ragged hierarchy. For balanced hierarchies, only the levels (attributes) required in the report template will be selected. Ragged hierarchies select all levels, even those not on the template, to ensure that data are not omitted.
Note: Hyperion Essbase presents special challenges in the handling of ragged/unbalanced hierarchies. Consult the following Strategy Knowledge Base technical notes for additional details.
KB17712
