Case Study 2

Dimensional Modeling

1. Northwind Business
1.1. About Northwind
In Northwind is a specialty foods distributor. It buys specialty foods from suppliers worldwide and
resells them to customers worldwide. It is particularly interested in analyzing its sales and shipping
activities and decisions so it can improve its customer order process. To do this it has decided to build a
business intelligence data warehouse (BIDW).
1.2. Northwind Business Processes
The Northwind supply chain includes these major business processes:

Purchase Foods
Store Foods in Inventory
Receive Customer Orders
Ship Customer Orders

Since its objective is to improve the customer order process, Northwind has decided that the first BIDW
project will include both the Receive Customer Orders business process and the Ship Customer Orders
business process. The purchasing and inventory processes will be excluded from this initial project.
1.3. Northwind Business Questions
Some of Northwind's business questions are:

What were our top selling products? This month? This quarter? YTD? This month last year?
Last YTD?
Who are our best customers in terms of sales? How many orders did our best customers place
last month? What was the average order amount? What was the average number of items per
order?
How many orders were shipped on time? Late? How late?
How much did we sell by each product category in each time period?
Give me a report by customer by product category for last month.

1.4. Analysis of Northwind Business Rules Based on Their ER Data Model

Northwind has a data model of its normalized operational database, also known as an ER model as
shown in Figure 1. An analysis of this model reveals the following business rules.

Each customer order has one or more line items. Each line represents the sale of one product.
Products are grouped into product categories, as shown by the one-to-many relationship
between the Categories table and the Products table.
Suppliers supply many products, but each product is purchased from only one supplier, as
shown by the one-to-many relationship between the Suppliers table and the Products table.
Each customer order is sold by a sales employee.
1
E.R.L. Jalao
eljalao@up.edu.ph

Northwind has sales regions, each consisting of several sales employee territories.
Northwind has tables for data about customer demographics in its ER model but the
operational systems intended to populate these tables have not been implemented.

2. Northwind E/R to Dimensional Model

Convert the E/R model to a dimensional model using Dimensional Normal Form (DNF)
methodology.

An Excel template is provided to design and submit your solution.

Use the three-step DNF design method described in slides 18-20 of 5.0 Dimension tables.

3. Instructions:
DNF Step 1. Develop Third Normal Form (3NF) models for each of three dimensions Date, Store,
and Product. The Store and Product 3NF models already exist in the source. You will only need to
design the Date 3NF model from scratch since it does not exist in the source ER model. NOTE: Set
the Transaction and Transaction Product tables aside until Step 3. The reason we set them aside is
because, in DNF design, we design the dimensions first, separate from the fact tables, since
dimensions may be used with many different fact tables, not just the original tables they were
associated with in the ER model.
DNF Step 2. Convert the 3NF models to dimension families.
DNF Step 3. Design two fact tables based on the source Transaction and Transaction Product tables.
Name one Transaction Item Fact; its grain is one row for each product sold in each store in each
transaction for each day. Add a Transaction Dimension; do not use a degenerate dimension. Name the
other fact table Monthly Category Summary Fact; its grain is to be one row for each Category for
each Month. Join the appropriate dimension family tables to the fact tables. Make sure the dimension
table grains match the fact table grains.

2
E.R.L. Jalao
eljalao@up.edu.ph

Figure 1. Northwinds E-R Model

Case Adapted From UCI BIDW Course

3
E.R.L. Jalao
eljalao@up.edu.ph