About
Interdimensional irrelevance occurs when many members of a dimension are irrelevant across other dimensions.
Essbase defines irrelevant data as data that Essbase stores only at the summary (dimension) level.
Irrelevant data are known also as :
- level based measure
- measure stored in a dimension table
Articles Related
Solution
In such a situation, you may be able to :
- remove a dimension from the database and add its members to another dimension
- or split the model into separate databases.
- use the OBIEE - Federated Query / Multi-Database or Cross-Database Join capabilities of OBIEE to split the salaries information in an other place and to made it relevant only for one level with the creation of a level based measure
Example : salaries
For example, TBC considered analyzing salaries as a member of the Measures dimension. But salary information often are stored as a dimension column. The salary typically represent one cell, with no reason to intersect with any other dimension.
An “X” in a cell indicates relevance. Only the Salary measure is relevant to individual employees.
Example of Interdimensional Irrelevance
| Measures | Joe Smith | Mary Jones | Mike Garcia | All Employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | x | |||
| Variable Costs | x | |||
| COGS | x | |||
| Advertising | x | |||
| Salaries | x | x | x | x |
| Fixed Costs | x | |||
| Expenses | x | |||
| Profit | x |
Because individual employee information is irrelevant to the other information in the database, and also because adding an Employee dimension would substantially increase database storage needs, TBC created a separate Human Resources (HR) database. The new HR database contains a group of related dimensions and includes salaries, benefits, insurance, and 401(k) plans.