Conceptual Data Model - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services - page 38

Rules of Inheritance

Analysis Services has two distinct ways of inheriting values from the parent at the time
of object's creation:

. Static inheritance

. Dynamic inheritance

Static inheritance means that at the time the object is created any of the values not speci-
fied in the object's definition will be explicitly assigned values taken from the parent. For
example, if you create a Dimension object and omit the Language property, one will be
created in the new dimension and an assigned value will be copied from the Database
object. That also means changing parent object properties leads to the new child objects
inheriting new values and old objects keeping the old values. Therefore, you might end
up in a situation where some of the objects in the collection differ without you taking
explicit action.

Dynamic inheritance means the property of the object is not explicitly defined for the
object at the time of the creation (if not specified by you). When you are trying to obtain
object metadata from the server, the dynamically inherited property will not appear in
the object definition. Its value is calculated by the server at the time it requires. For
example, if the ErrorConfiguration object is not explicitly specified for the Partition
object at the time of creation, you will discover the ErrorConfiguration object missing
from the partition definition when you try to query partition metadata. During the parti-
tion processing, the server will query parent objects of the partition to obtain values
needed to handle errors.