Strategy ONE

MDX Level Number Calculation Method

MDX Level Number Calculation is an advanced property that is hidden by default. For information on how to display this property, see Viewing and Changing Advanced VLDB Properties.

This VLDB property is useful only for MDX cube reports that access an Oracle Hyperion Essbase MDX cube source. To help illustrate the functionality of the property, consider an unbalanced hierarchy with the levels Products, Department, Category, SubCategory, Item, and SubItem. The image below shows how this hierarchy is populated on a report in MicroStrategy.

The level SubItem causes the hierarchy to be unbalanced, which displaces the levels of the hierarchy when populated on a report in MicroStrategy. For more information on unbalanced and ragged hierarchies, see the MDX Cube Reporting Help.

You can choose from the following settings:

  • Use actual level number (default): When this option is selected, an unbalanced or ragged hierarchy from Essbase is populated on a grid from the bottom of the hierarchy up, as shown in the image above.

  • Use generation number to calculate level number: When this option is selected, an unbalanced or ragged hierarchy from Essbase is populated on a grid from the top of the hierarchy down. If this setting is selected for the example scenario described above, the report is populated as shown in the image below.

The unbalanced hierarchy is now displayed on the report with an accurate representation of the corresponding levels.

Setting this VLDB property to Add the generation number property for a ragged hierarchy from Essbase can cause incorrect formatting.

Levels at Which You Can Set This

Database instance and report