Book Image

The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Third Edition

By : Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross
Book Image

The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Third Edition

By: Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross

Overview of this book

The volume of data continues to grow as warehouses are populated with increasingly atomic data and updated with greater frequency. Dimensional modeling has become the most widely accepted approach for presenting information in data warehouse and business intelligence (DW/BI) systems. The goal of this book is to provide a one-stop shop for dimensional modeling techniques. The book is authored by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross, known worldwide as educators, consultants, and influential thought leaders in data warehousing and business intelligence. The book begins with a primer on data warehousing, business intelligence, and dimensional modeling, and you’ll explore more than 75-dimensional modeling techniques and patterns. Then you’ll understand dimension tables in-depth to get a good grip on retailing and moved towards the topics of inventory. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how to use this book for procurement, order management, accounting, customer relationship management, and many more business sectors. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to gather all the essential knowledge, practices, and patterns for designing dimensional models.
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
2
Title Page
3
Copyright
4
About the Authors
5
Credits
6
Acknowledgements
29
Index
30
Advertisement
31
End User License Agreement

Conformed Dimensions

Now that you understand the importance of the enterprise bus architecture, let’s further explore the standardized conformed dimensions that serve as the cornerstone of the bus because they’re shared across business process fact tables. Conformed dimensions go by many other aliases: common dimensions, master dimensions, reference dimensions, and shared dimensions. Conformed dimensions should be built once in the ETL system and then replicated either logically or physically throughout the enterprise DW/BI environment. When built, it’s extremely important that the DW/BI development teams take the pledge to use these dimensions. It’s a policy decision that is critical to making the enterprise DW/BI system function; their usage should be mandated by the organization’s CIO.

Drilling Across Fact Tables

In addition to consistency and reusability, conformed dimensions enable you to combine performance measurements from different business...