Cubes, Dimensions and Hierarchies

Cubes

All your business data in CALUMO is contained in a cube - which is basically, your data (or database).

A cube is made up of dimensions and hierarchies that define your particular business model.

Dimensions

Dimensions represent your main business concepts and are a collection of names (which are hierarchies) that provide the starting point for exploration of your data. See the dimension tree on the left-side of Data Explorer - the top-most item Measures is a special-case dimension.

Attributes are used to capture details about the dimension. For example, color, type, and size, are attributes that can be used to capture the details of a Product (dimension). Similarly, day , month and year could be attributes to capture the details of a Time dimension.

Attributes have relationships with one another eg a day has 24 hours, a month has 28-31 days. When the attributes are organized in order to represent their relationship with each another, we have a hierarchy.

Hierarchies

A hierarchy, then, is a set of members organized into a structure for convenient analysis. There are 3 different types of hierarchy represented in CALUMO. The hierarchies that make up a dimension will depend on the way your data is designed to be explored and may be whatever makes sense to your business.

A level is a collection of members which have the same distance from the root of the hierarchy. 

A member being a point within a dimension determined by a particular set of attribute values. So, a gender hierarchy might have two members: Male and Female. While the City hierarchy might contain members Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.