Working with SAP HANA Parent Child Hierarchies

A parent child relationships can be used to model many types of hierarchy, including ragged hierarchies, balanced hierarchies, and unbalanced hierarchies.

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) originally required us to use parent child hierarchies. Often when connecting live to HANA, you could be modeling your hierarchies in this way.

Below, we can see an example organisational structure. This is an unbalanced hierarchy as the depth of the hierarchy varies depending which part of the organisation you look at.

The Parent Child hierarchy in HANA

There are two types of hierarchies supported in HANA:

• Parent-Child hierarchy
• Level hierarchy

In this document, I would like to take the readers through the Parent child hierarchy: to create a very simple Parent Child hierarchy and to use it in a reporting tool that supports multidimensional reporting, like A-Office.