Our SAP HANA application is at this point fairly rich. We have data in tables which we have used in attribute, analytic, and calculation views. We have authorizations defining who can see the data present in them. We're almost ready to deliver our application to our users so that they can work with the data themselves and do their own analysis.

One useful visualization option on data that users love is the notion of hierarchies. Hierarchies allow us to group objects together, and more importantly, give us subtotals along similar grouping lines. A hierarchy uses the parent-child analogy, where the child node is a logical subgroup of the parent node.

Probably the most common hierarchy that we use in our everyday life is the time hierarchy, even if we usually don't think of it in that way. If we were to look at time as a hierarchy, we could visualize it like this:

The advantage using hierarchies is the automatic aggregation of values they provide...