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

15
Electronic Commerce

A web-intensive business’s clickstream data records the gestures of every web visitor. In its most elemental form, the clickstream is every page event recorded by each of the company’s web servers. The clickstream contains a number of new dimensions, such as page, session, and referrer, which are not found in other data sources. The clickstream is a torrent of data; it can be difficult and exasperating for DW/BI professionals. Does it connect to the rest of the DW/BI system? Can its dimensions and facts be conformed in the enterprise data warehouse bus architecture?

We start this chapter by describing the raw clickstream data source and designing its relevant dimensional models. We discuss the impact of Google Analytics, which can be thought of as an external data warehouse delivering information about your website. We then integrate clickstream data into a larger matrix of more conventional processes for a web retailer, and argue that the profitability...