Understanding Best Practices - Attribute Hierarchies

The following are the best practices when creating the attribute hierarchies:

• Planful delivers system-define attributes.
• For Financial Segments, you may have up to 25 attributes per dimension.
• For Sales, you may have up to 10 attributes per dimension.
• You can build two types of Attribute hierarchies; Rollup Based on Attributes or Rollup Created Manually. Use Rollup Based on Attributes when possible. Manual rollups are used to build the hierarchy similar to the chart of account hierarchy.
• Avoid having too many members under one parent. For example, one parent with 300 children is a good candidate for revision.
• You attribute hierarchy should contain no more than 5 to 7 levels.
• The List type attribute offers the best performance over any other attribute type.
• When you have TEXT, NUMERIC, or DATE type attributes, add them as member properties to the cube rather than to the attribute itself.
• Attributes increase the overall cube space so use them accordingly. Try not to exceed 5 attributes on a single dimension. Try limiting the number of attributes (8 to 10).
• Not all attributes are required for reporting or slice or dice.
• Dimension security is available for attributes, but data level security leads to performance implications.
• Attributes perform better versus member properties in the reporting cube. It’s best to configure less than 3 attributes as member properties.
• The maximum number of attributes that can be mapped to a cube is 5.