Ragged Dimension Support
A ragged dimension is a dimension with at least one member whose logical parent is not in the level immediately above the member. For example, a Geography dimension consists of the levels Country, Province, and City. The logical parent of Geneva is Switzerland because Switzerland is not divided into provinces. Because of the missing information for the Province level, the Geography dimension becomes a ragged dimension.
In a ragged dimension's table, the logically missing members, such as the province containing Geneva in the preceding example, can be represented in different ways. The table cells can contain nulls or empty strings, or they can contain the same value as their parent to serve as a placeholder. For example, in the column for the Province level, in rows that contain cities in Switzerland, the value is Switzerland. The nonexistent province of Switzerland is stored as a placeholder because its parent at the Country level is Switzerland.
The representation of placeholders is determined by the placeholder status of child members and the MDXCompatibilityValue registry setting (or MDX Compatibility connection string property) for PivotTable® Service. If a placeholder has child members that contain data, then its visibility to client applications is dependent on the MDXCompatibilityValue registry setting. If a placeholder has no child members, or if all child members of a placeholder are also placeholders with no child members, the placeholder is always skipped, regardless of the MDXCompatibilityValue registry setting.