Conformed Dimensions

If you work with more than one dimensional data source, you may notice that some dimensions are structured the same, and some are not.

The reason that dimensions can be structured differently is that the data sources may serve different purposes.

For example, a Customer dimension appears in a Revenue data store, but not in an Inventory data store. However, the Products dimension and the Time dimension appear in both data stores.

Dimensions that appear in multiple data stores are conformed if their structure is identical for all of the following:

hierarchy names
level names
level order
internal keys

Drilling through is possible between different dimensional data stores only if the dimensions are conformed, and if the dimension data store is of the same vendor type, such as IBM® Cognos® PowerCube as the source and the target. For example, in two data stores for Revenue and Inventory that contain Products and Time dimensions, it is possible to define the Products and Time dimensions differently for each data store. However, for drill-through between the Products and Time dimensions to work, their structures must be identical in each data store.

If you are not sure whether your dimensions are conformed, then you should check with the data modeler to ensure that the drilling through will produce meaningful results.

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence does not support conformed dimensions generated by IBM Cognos Framework Manager for SAP BW data sources.

Dimensionally modeled Relational Data Sources

Ensure that each level contains a business key that has values that match your PowerCube or other DMR models. Also, you must also ensure that the Root Business Key property is set and uses the business key of the first level in the hierarchy. This helps to ensure that you have a conformed member unique name when attempting to drill through using members from this dimension.