Attribute relationships

Building an effective project in MicroStrategy requires you, as the project designer, to have a solid understanding of all the attributes in the project, as well as how each of them relates to the other attributes.

Attribute relationships, which are associations between attributes that specify how attributes are connected, are essential to the logical data model. Without relationships, there is no interaction between data, and therefore no logical structure. The relationships give meaning to the data by providing logical associations of attributes based on business rules.

Every direct relationship between attributes has two parts—a parent and a child. A child must always have a parent and a parent can have multiple children. The parent attribute is at a higher logical level than the child is. For example, in a relationship between Year and Quarter, Year is the parent attribute and Quarter is the child.

Attributes are either related or unrelated to each other. Examples of related and unrelated attributes, along with more detailed information about attribute relationships, are discussed in Attribute relationships.