Book Image

The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Third Edition

By : Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross
5 (2)
Book Image

The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Third Edition

5 (2)
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

Localization Recap

We have discussed the challenges of international DW/BI system in several chapters of the book. In addition to the international time zones and calendars discussed in the previous two sections, we have also talked about multi-currency reporting in Chapter 6 and multi-language support in Chapter 8: Customer Relationship Management.

All these database-centric techniques fall under the general theme of localization. Localization in the larger sense also includes the translation of user interface text embedded in BI tools. BI tool vendors implement this form of localization with text databases containing all the text prompts and labels needed by the tool, which can then be configured for each local environment. Of course, this can become quite complicated because text translated from English to most European languages results in text strings that are longer than their English equivalents, which may force a redesign of the BI application. Also, Arabic text reads from right...