Parent/Child Hierarchy
This is also a classical way of defining OLAP hierarchies. Here the member parent-child relationship is defined explicitly with an id and a parent_id column. This type of dimension does not need the levels defined in advance.
Example
Let's use the same simple dimension data we used for the multi-level example. As you can see the data does not implicitly define the level of each member. Only id, parent_id, as well as name, are needed to define the structure.
id, parent_id, name , key
1 , , Europe ,
2 , , America ,
3 , 1 , France , FR
4 , 2 , United States , US
5 , 2 , Canada , CA
6 , 2 , Mexico , MX
1) After creating the new table, defining the [Geography] dimension is just a step away:
2) And this is all we need to define our simple [Geography] dimension. We can now check the results on the dimension browser:
Next chapter: Path Dimensions