A business intelligence (BI) server and repository are described which support a set of hierarchical relationships among the data. The BI server receives user input specifying a set of parent-child or other ancestral relationship among a set of data in a data source. The BI server generates a set of SQL queries and executes the queries to pre-populate a set of tables which specify the parent child relationships among the data in the data source. One such table is a parent-child relationship closure table that defines the inter-member relationships among the data members. Once the tables are populated, the BI server uses the closure tables to answer queries that require knowledge of the ancestral relationships among data.