Creating Levels

For business analysis, data is typically summarized at various levels. For example, your database may contain daily snapshots of a transactional database. Days are thus the base level. You might summarize this data at the weekly, quarterly, and yearly levels.

Levels have parent-child or one-to-many relationships, which form a hierarchy. For example, each week summarizes seven days, each quarter summarizes 13 weeks, and each year summarizes four quarters. This hierarchical structure enables analysts to detect trends at the higher levels, then drill down to the lower levels to identify factors that contributed to a trend.

For each level that you define, you must identify a data source for dimension members at that level. Members at all levels are stored in the same dimension. In the previous example, the Time dimension will contain members for days, weeks, quarters, and years.

To create a level:

Expand the folder for the dimension.
Right-click Levels, then choose Create Level from the pop-up menu.

The Create Level dialog box is displayed.
Complete the General tab of the Create Level dialog box. Click Help for specific information about these choices.
Click Create.

The new level appears as an item in the Levels folder.
When you are done creating levels, create hierarchies for the dimension from these levels.