Balanced hierarchy

Each path in a balanced hierarchy descends to the same depth.

For example, in the following diagram, the highest level is Product Line(Level 1); Level 2 is Product Type; Level 3 is Products.

In SAP BW, all leaf nodes of a hierarchy are values of the characteristic, but each path does not need to descend to the lowest level of the hierarchy.

You can define whether a dimension represents a balanced hierarchy by modifying the Balanced property of a dimension. The value that you set depends on the type of object that the dimension represents, and whether the hierarchy is balanced.

For a dimension that represents a characteristic without a presentation hierarchy, this property is read-only and is assigned a value of true.

If a presentation hierarchy is balanced, then set the Balanced property of its associated dimension to true. By default, it has a value of false for all presentation hierarchies. A hierarchy is balanced if all leaf characteristic values occur at the lowest level of the hierarchy. By setting the Balanced property to true as appropriate, the IBM® Cognos® Analytics server can generate more efficient MDX.

When all paths are of the same depth, set the Balanced property to true, otherwise set it to false.

If you assign a value of true to the Balanced property of an unbalanced hierarchy, queries that involve this dimension may return incorrect data.

If you assign a value of false to the Balanced property of a balanced hierarchy, performance may be slower.