Rigid relationships are defined where you are shre that members will not change levels or their respective attribute relationships. For example. The time dimension. We know that month "January 2009" will only belong to Year "2009".
Flexible relations on the contarary are defined where there is a possibility that members can move around. For example, an employee and department. An employee can be in accounts department today but it is possible that the emplyee will be in Marketing department tomorrow.
The key point here is that flexible relationships force Analysis Services to drop and re-compute any existing aggregations during incremental dimension processing.Rigid relationships do not require the re-computing of existing aggregations during incremental processing and thereby reduce total processing time. Hierarchies with rigid relationships can also be queried faster than those with flexible relationships. The flip side of the coin is that changing any dependent attribute that has a rigid relationship within any hierarchy requires full process of the entire dimension.
Great info! I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have.
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