Dimensional Modeling

Primer

Chapter 1
Kimball & Ross
Concepts Discussed
 Business driven goals
 Data warehouse publishing
 Major components
 Importance of dimensional modeling for the
presentation area
 Facts & dimension tables
 Myths of dimensional modeling
 Pitfalls to avoid
Different Information Worlds
 Users of operational system turn the wheels
of an organization
 Users of data warehouse watch the wheels
of the organization turn
 Warehouse users have drastically different
needs than users of operational systems
Returning Themes
 We have mountains of data but we cannot access it
 We need to slice the data in different ways
 Need to make it easy for business users to access
the data
 Just show me what is important
 It drives me craze when different people present
the same metrics with different numbers
 Fact-based decision making
Goals of Data Warehouse
 Make an organization’s information easily
accessible
 Present the information in a consistent manner
 Adaptive and resilient to change
 Secure and protects information
 Serves as a foundation for improved decision
making
 Business users must accept the data warehouse if
it is to be useful
Publishing Metaphor
 Data warehouse manager is a “publisher” of
the right data
 Responsible for publishing data collected
from a variety of sources and edited for
quality and consistency
Components of a Data
Warehouse
 Operational source systems
 Data staging area
 Data presentation area
 Data access tools
Data Staging Area
 Key structural requirement is that is it off-
limits to business users and does not
provide query and presentation services.
– Correct misspellings, resolve domain conflicts,
deal with missing elements, parse into standard
formats, combine data from multiple sources.
– Normalized structures sometimes called
“enterprise data warehouse” – it is a misnomer
(Kimball).
Data Staging Area
 Dominated by simple activities sorting and
sequential processing.
 Normalized data is acceptable, although this
is not the end goal.
Data Presentation
 Series of integrated data marts. Data mart is
data from a single business process. Wedge
of the overall pie.
 Data must be presented, stored and accessed
in dimensional schema.
Data Presentation
 Should not be in normalized form.
 They must contain detailed atomic data in
addition to data in summary form, because
the queries are ad hoc and cannot be
predicted.
 Facts and dimensions – called conformed.
Presentation Area
 If it is based on a relational data base, it is
called start schema.
 If it is multidimensional database, or OLAP,
then the data is stored in cubes.
Data Access Tools
 Querying is the whole point of DW.
 Can be as simple as an ad hoc query tool or
as complex as a data mining or a modeling
application.
 Parameter driven analytic operations.
 80 to 90 of the users are served by canned
applications.
Additional Considerations
 Meta data
 Operational data store