What are "best-practices" for organizing location/geographic data so that it plays nice with map layers?

[Steve_Guidi]

Hello!  I’m experimenting with map layers for rendering data in geographical regions and I’m finding some limitations that I can’t seem to work around.  Perhaps this is caused by my data schema, or my understanding of how-to best use map_layer_name in a dimension, or both.

My view has dimensions for country, state, city, and postal code, but the dimensional data may contain location information for any country, and any of that country’s states/provinces, cities, etc…  The dimensional data is denormalized into the fact table, but that may change as we add more location-related attributes.

It seems like many of the existing map layer files are region-specific.  That said, is there a strategy to load a correct map layer file given context of the country or region being queried, perhaps by inspecting a filter or query column?  Ideally, I’d like to support a world-view, but that only seems possible if I find world map layer file.  I’m also curious if modifying my schema will make a world-view presentation much more feasible.