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, parentId, name, order, value
1,,World, 2,
2,1,Asia, 2, 2
3,1,Europe, 1, 4
4,3,Spain, 3, 8
5,3,France, 1, 16
6,3,Switzerland, 2, 32
1) After creating the new table, defining the [Geography] dimension is just a step away:
You can check the different option with this schema here.
Next chapter: Path Dimensions