Limitations with ragged and unbalanced hierarchies and aggregated values

Ragged and unbalanced hierarchies can create gaps within individual paths of a hierarchy, as well as nodes at intermediate levels with no descendants at lower levels. If a report includes query items from a single dimension that are from consecutive or adjacent levels in a hierarchy, the fact values associated with the lower levels should always aggregate to the values associated with the higher levels of the dimension in the report.

However, if the query items are not from consecutive or adjacent levels, and the underlying SAP BW hierarchy is ragged or unbalanced, it is possible that the values of the higher levels may not reflect the aggregation of the fact values from the lower levels. The aggregated fact values associated with the higher levels reflect the aggregated values in the data source. This is typical behavior for OLAP data sources, but may be counterintuitive to those accustomed to reporting against relational data sources.