When it comes to the design of a data warehouse, there is basically one option that makes the most sense for how we will structure our database and that is the dimensional model. This is a way of looking at the data from a business perspective that makes the data simple, understandable, and easy to query for the business end user. It doesn't require a database administrator to be able to retrieve data from it.
When looking at the source databases in the last chapter, we saw a normalized method of modeling a database. A normalized model removes redundancies in data by storing information in discrete tables, and then referencing those tables when needed. This has an advantage for a transactional system because information needs to be entered at only one place in the database, without duplicating any information already entered. For example, in the ACME Toys and Gizmos transactional database, each time a transaction is recorded for the sale of an item at a register, a record...