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

Integrating Clickstream into Web Retailer’s Bus Matrix

This section considers the business processes needed by a web-based computer retailer. The retailer’s enterprise data warehouse bus matrix is illustrated in Figure 15-8. Note the matrix lists business process subject areas, not individual fact tables. Typically, each matrix row results in a suite of closely associated fact tables and/or OLAP cubes, which all represent a particular business process.

image

Figure 15-8: Bus matrix for web retailer.

The Figure 15-8 matrix has a number of striking characteristics. There are a lot of check marks. Some of the dimensions, such as date/time, organization, and employee appear in almost every business process. The product and customer dimensions dominate the middle part of the matrix, where they are attached to business processes that describe customer-oriented activities. At the top of the matrix, suppliers and parts dominate the processes of acquiring the parts that make up products...