Metric Level Determination

The Metric Level Determination VLDB property defines how the level of data is stored for reports. This level is used to make other determinations for the report such as the level at which to report metric data. This VLDB property has the following options:

• Include only lowest-level attributes in metric level (default): The report's level is defined using only the lowest-level attributes available in the report. This option correctly reflects the level of data in the report while also optimizing the amount of resources required to define the level of the report.

  For example, a report includes the attributes Year, Month, Category, and Subcategory. The Year and Month attributes are from the same hierarchy and Month is the lowest-level attribute from that hierarchy on the report. Similarly, the Category and Subcategory attributes are from the same hierarchy and Subcategory is the lowest-level attribute from that hierarchy on the report. When selecting this option for the Metric Level Determination VLDB property, the level of the report is defined as Month and Subcategory. It can be defined in this way because these are the lowest-level attributes from the hierarchies that are present on the report.

  This level can then be used with metrics to determine the level at which their data must be reported. If the physical schema of your project matches the expected logical schema, correct metric data is displayed and the resources required to determine the report level are optimized.

• Include higher-level related attributes in metric level: The report's level is defined using all attributes available in the report. This option correctly reflects the level of data in the report, but it can require additional resources to define the level of the report.

  Consider the example used to describe the previous option. If the physical schema of your project matches the expected logical schema, then including only the lowest-level attributes displays correct metric data. However, differences between your physical schema and expected logical schema can cause unexpected data to be displayed if only the lowest level attributes are used to define the level of the report.

  For example, while the relationship between the Category and Subcategory attributes is defined as a one-to-many relationship, the data in your data source reflects a many-to-many relationship. Because of this mismatch, including only the lowest-level attributes can return unexpected metric data. By selecting this option for the Metric Level Determination VLDB property, the additional higher-level attributes are included when defining the level of the report and can be used to return the metric data as it exists in the data source. However, while this helps return accurate data in these types of scenarios, the higher-level attributes require additional resources to define the level of the report.

Levels at Which You Can Set This

Project and report