Before introducing modeling in SAP HANA Cloud, you must become familiar with some key concepts that are frequently used when reporting on financial or operational data, for example:
Measure
Attribute
Dimension
Star schema
Hierarchy
Semantics
Measure and Attribute
When you report on data, you have to distinguish between the following important concepts:
Measure
Attribute
Measure Versus Attribute
Measure | Attribute | |
---|---|---|
Definition | A numeric value, such as a price, quantity, or volume, on which you can process arithmetic or statistics operations, such as sum, average, top N values, and calculations. | An element that is used to describe a measure. |
Examples |
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Attributes are used to filter or aggregate the measures, in order to answer questions such as the following:
What are the total sales originating from Sales Org. located in the EMEA region?
What is the sales revenue generated by the product Cars?
One key objective of modeling in SAP HANA Cloud is to create a relevant association between attributes and measures to fulfill a particular reporting requirement.
Dimension
In a number of cases, analyzing the measures is easier if you group attributes together by dimension.
In the example below, the sales organization would be treated as a dimension, with the following associated attributes:
Country
Region
Similarly, a Product ID dimension could be associated with several attributes, such as product name, product category, or supplier.

Star Schema
Watch this video to learn about the Star Schema.
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is a structured representation of an organization, a list of products, the time dimension, and so on, by levels.
It is used to navigate the entire set of members with more ease (the location of the company, the products, or the days, weeks, months, or years) when analyzing the data.
Watch this video to learn about the hierarchy concept.
Similarly, the list of products that a company sells could be organized into a hierarchy, by classifying the products by product area or product type.
Semantics
The term semantics is used to describe what a piece of data means, or relates to. For example, a piece of numeric data that you report can be of different types. Here are a few examples:
A monetary value
For example, the total amount of sales orders would need to indicate the currency (for example USD, EUR, or GBP)..
A quantity, weight, volume, or distance
For example, the quantity would need to specify the unit of measurement in which the data is expressed.
During modeling, we add semantics to individual columns and even the entire model to provide additional metadata. This metadata is read by consuming clients, such as reporting tools, so that the data is displayed correctly (e.g. currency or dates) or is calculated correctly (e.g. averageinstead of sum).