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The data warehousing literature offers extensive discussions about changing dimension types and their corresponding solutions. This nomenclature and these solutions have become conventional and are sometimes even built into system integration tools. Hyperion Essbase has had since Version 9 a feature known as "Varying Attributes" designed to address the challenges discussed in the data warehousing literature.

This presentation is not an effort to conform Hyperion Planning to these now conventional ways of dealing with changing dimensions. It is neither an attempt to elaborate on the use of "Varying Attributes." Instead, the presentation focuses on the underlying computational phenomenon, that of changing dimensionalities, and shows how arrays, the foundational technology within Hyperion Planning, offer opportunities to address requirements that lie beyond the capabilities of "Varying Attributes" and beyond the classifications explained in the data warehousing literature. To focus and direct the contents of this presentation, the following requirement was established: In a Hyperion Planning form, display for comparison: YTD Profit at the end of June of the current year based on the metadata of December of last year and YTD Profit at the end of September of some future year based on the metadata for January of that same year generated by a forecasting algorithm launched by a business rule when the user's input is saved.

This requirement, while a bit convoluted, is not entirely artificial. The presenter has encountered elements of it in his practice. The requirement clearly indicates that a) the solution must operate within the Hyperion Planning interactive user environment (it cannot use features that are available only in Essbase) and b) it must support interactive forecasting of both data and metadata. Consequently, the solution must address the challenges posed by changing dimensions, as defined in the data warehousing literature. The above requirement is in fact similar to requirements mentioned in demonstrations of the capabilities of Essbase's feature "Varying Attributes" but it has an additional level of complexity: the metadata must be allowed to change anytime, at the discretion of a user, without the intervention of a database administrator and without causing a database restructure. The presentation addresses the problem progressively, by means of an evolving example, and a series of increasingly analytically powerful solutions to the example.