BY Variables

Assign this role to one or more variables that should be used as the default attributes of the project. Use attributes to create filtersa set of specified criteria that are applied to data in order to identify the subset of data for a subsequent operation, such as continued processing. to work with subsets of the project data. You can also order your BY variables for hierarchical forecasting. The default attributes should have discrete values, such as character data or numeric data with a limited set of values.

Note: For performance reasons, you should not assign variables that have a continuous value as BY variables. Continuous BY variables with too many digits after the decimal point are not processed safely and can adversely impact cross-table mappings and visualizations. See Display as range for a description of continuous values.

After you run a pipeline with the hierarchy defined, you can no longer remove variables from the selected list.

For more information, see Assigning the Default Attributes.

The order of the default attributes is also used for hierarchical forecasting. For more information, see Defining the Hierarchy.

Last updated: March 16, 2026