Summary
In this chapter, we focused primarily on financial data in the general ledger, both in terms of periodic snapshots as well as journal entry transactions. We discussed the handling of common G/L data challenges, including multiple currencies, multiple fiscal years, unbalanced organizational trees, and the urge to create to-date totals.
We used the familiar organization rollup structure to show how to model complex ragged hierarchies of indeterminate depth. We introduced a special bridge table for these hierarchies, and compared this approach to others.
We explored the series of events in a budgeting process chain. We described the use of “net change” granularity in this situation rather than creating snapshots of the budget data totals. We also discussed the concept of consolidated fact tables that combine the results of separate business processes when they are frequently analyzed together.
Finally, we discussed the natural fit of OLAP products for financial analysis...