Patent ID: 8326857

Claim:
A method for providing value hierarchies in a business intelligence server environment, said method comprising: receiving, on a user interface of a business intelligence (BI) server, a specification of ancestral relationships among a set of data stored in a data source; generating, by the BI server, a set of structured query language (SQL) queries and executing said SQL queries on the data source to pre-populate a set of closure tables, wherein each closure table contains one row for every pair of members that have said ancestral relationship of any distance; and receiving, at the BI server, a request for the ancestral relationship of a particular data member; and employing the set of closure tables by said BI server to generate a response to said request, said response indicating the ancestral relationship of said data member, wherein the BI server represents a level hierarchy by implementing a separate column for each level of the hierarchy, wherein each level of the hierarchy is represented by a level key; wherein the BI server determines that a particular level in the level hierarchy is skipped and contains no value at said particular level and represents the skipped level of the hierarchy with a null key, and wherein if the skipped level is discovered by the BI server during retrieval of information while drilling down through the level hierarchy, the BI server determines which next level following the skipped level contains a value and returns said value in the next level.