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A relation is an object that establishes a correspondence between the values of a given dimension and the values of that same dimension or other dimensions in the analytic workspace. Relations are dimensioned arrays. Each cell in a relation holds the index of the value of a dimension. You can define relations between two or more dimensions, multiple relations between a set of dimensions, or a dimension with itself (a self-relation).
Most frequently, a relation is a self-relation for a hierarchical dimension. By creating a relation between values in a dimension that participate in a one-to-many (parent-to-child) relationship, you can organize your data by the child values and view aggregates of data by the parent values. For example, you can create a geog.parent
relation for a geography
dimension to define the relationships between the city and state values in geography
. In this way you can organize the data by city and view the aggregates of data by state.