Louis,

If I understand your question properly, you're interested in how to
represent a hierarchy in a dimension table, I assume without snowflaking
your schema?  How deep is the hierarchy?  One possible solution may be to
create additional columns in the dimension table such that each row will
contain a cross-tabulated representation of the hierarchy.  That will
generally solve the problem easily -- and perform well -- if the hierarchy
is shallow enough (and its depth is known in advance).  If you can't make
those kinds of guarantees during the design phase, I'm not sure how to solve
the problem other than snowflaking and having a separate hierarchy table.