Ideal Number of Categories in a Dimension built in transformer

[jguevin]

Does anyone know the "best practice" for number of categories in a dimension when building a model in Transformer?

Thanks
Jeff

[srikalyan]

maximum no. of categories allowed are 65536.

[Opher]

Well, I'm not 100% certain, and don't have the time right now to run a test, but I believe the reply is incomplete.  The limit of 65536 categories is for child categories, not for the whole Dimension.  For an entire Dimension, I think the limit is closer to 2,000,000.

Going back to the original poster, best practice in designing a Dimension is to have 7-10 categories at the top level and then a 10:1 ratio on each level, so with 10 at the top level, 100 at the second, 1000 at the third, etc.  Transformer will produce a warning message if a single branch gets too many of the child categories.

Good luck,
Opher

[Darek]

There is no physical limit on the # of categories. There is a "supportable" or "making sense" limit of 2M you've mentioned.

And you can override the warning, meaning, increase the number of allowable child categories before a warning is issued.