General functional dependencies
Simple aggregation formulas create functional dependencies between the parent’s data and the data of its children. A more general approach honored by Essbase is to associate one or more sets of statements to each member (nothing prevents us from assigning formulas to cells as well).
Each statement may be a direct or indirect assignment.
Direct assignment applies to the associated member (and hence to the whole section of the cube via this member). Indirect assignment may apply to any member or member combination, up to a cell. Such assignments provide great flexibility in the way of stuffing cells with derived data but they also carry potential for problems and conflicts.