How to manage changing parent child hierarchys in Analysis Services 2005-SSAS

How to manage changing parent child hierarchys in Analysis Services 2005

Written by Richard Tkachuk

Wednesday, 02 May 2007 15:27

A changing dimension is a common issue in many OLAP applications. The problem is pretty broad:

- Members moving around. For example, after a company reorganization a sales region can be moved from one area to another.

- Characteristics of a dimension member change, For example, the address of a customer changes.

In this note, I’m not going to attempt the definitive guide to managing changing dimensions. Instead, I want to address a request that came from a customer on how best to manage members moving around in a parent child dimension with the simple requirement that users can see how data rolls up the dimension as the dimension was structured at the time of the transaction and that the total value for each dimension member is available over a period of time that it moved around two or more times.

This document assumes some knowledge of Analysis Services.