Our most recent community show featured a deep dive into Reltio's materialized hierarchy management capabilities, a powerful new approach to modeling and navigating complex hierarchy structures in Reltio. The session, led by Saurabh Agarwal, Principal Product Manager at Reltio, covered the challenges of traditional relationship-based hierarchies, a live demo of the new node-based approach, and a look at what's coming next.
Why Hierarchy Management Needed a Rethink
Saurabh opened by explaining the operational overhead of Reltio's legacy, relationship-based hierarchies: modifying a structure meant deleting and recreating relationships one at a time, and performance degraded significantly as hierarchies grew longer, since each level had to be resolved by tracing through the chain of relationships. These constraints made it difficult for customers to manage large or complex hierarchies effectively.
Introducing Materialized Hierarchy
To solve this, Reltio built materialized hierarchy — a node-based model that links entity IDs directly as parent and child, rather than requiring a formal relationship between them. The full hierarchy is stored as a materialized object in the database, dramatically improving performance and enabling hierarchies with hundreds of thousands of nodes.
Key Capabilities Covered in the Demo
-
Simple configuration: Define a hierarchy type by selecting which entity types belong to it, then enable the Hierarchy tab on those entity types via UI config
-
Flexible building: Create hierarchies directly in the UI by adding parents, children, and siblings with no limit on the number of levels
-
Versioning and effective dating: Clone a hierarchy into a new version (for example, winter vs. summer) and assign start/end dates to entire versions or individual nodes, then view the hierarchy structure as of any specific date
-
Move, copy, and clone: Reassign a node to a new parent, copy structures, or clone an entire hierarchy as a starting point for a new one
-
Import and export: Build hierarchies at scale using CSV or JSON templates, with support for versioned and non-versioned formats, or export any hierarchy for offline use
-
API parity: Every UI operation is also available through documented APIs for bulk or automated management
-
Multi-cloud availability: Originally launched on AWS, the feature is now available across all three supported clouds
Saurabh walked through a live example, building a "3J Trucking LLC" organization hierarchy with regions, business units, and teams — demonstrating how a node like Europe, given an effective end date of August 31, automatically disappears from the structure once that date passes, without needing to be manually deleted.
What's on the Roadmap
Looking ahead, Saurabh outlined several enhancements planned for upcoming releases:
-
Structure validation: Enforcing rules such as requiring a specific entity type at the root or under certain parents
-
Attribute value inheritance: Automatically passing attribute values from parent to child based on defined conditions
-
Sibling order management: Controlling the display order of nodes under the same parent
-
Crosswalk-based management: Managing hierarchies using crosswalk information instead of entity ID alone, across imports, exports, and APIs
-
Partial override on import: Editing or updating an existing hierarchy through data upload, rather than always creating a new one (targeted for the 26.2 release)
-
Merge/unmerge notifications: Alerting users in-app when an entity merge or unmerge unexpectedly changes hierarchy structure
-
Hierarchy-specific change requests: A dedicated approval workflow for reviewing and accepting or rejecting hierarchy changes
Q&A Highlights
Attendees asked about exporting hierarchies and retrieving all descendants of a given root entity by ID. Saurabh confirmed that export is available both through the UI and via API, and noted the team would follow up with documentation on API options for retrieving a full list of child entity IDs for a given root — to be linked alongside the recording once posted.
Reltio's community show calendar remains full for the rest of the year, with sessions on Smarter RDM on August 19 and Inside Reltio IDE on September 2.
#CommunityWebinar
#Featured
#DataCleansing