Define and create a data layer. That was the task my team was handed a few weeks back, with minimal context. The client is a…
Blog,Data Warehousing
Data warehouses and modern cloud architectures go together better than chocolate and peanut butter. The “abilities” (scalability, flexibility, reliability, etc.) of the cloud allows one…
Traditional data warehouses were often created as custom reporting data structures using on-site servers. These on-prem servers need to have a team of DBAs, storage…
The definition of an Operational Data Store (ODS) is a subject-oriented, integrated, volatile collection of current data designed to support the tactical decision-making of an…
The three keys to warehouse project success are to quickly, efficiently and consistently refresh the data in the warehouse. Here are four ways to design…
You often hear “drilling down” and “drilling across” from business intelligence professionals, but what does it mean and how do you, as a data modeler,…
You will inevitably come across a time when a source system will allow the updating of transaction records. This drives data modelers, ETL developers, analytics…
In my last post I discussed late arriving facts, and although it is slightly annoying to receive delayed transaction data, the impact on the ETL…
Late arriving facts are those transactions which are delayed in arriving to the warehouse. For Type I data warehouses there is no real impact but…
Factless facts are those fact tables that have no measures associated with the transaction. Factless facts are a simple collection of dimensional keys which define…
We have all come across times when our customer wants to know how the organization is currently doing. They often want to know how they…
Often management looks for bottlenecks in corporate processes so that they can be streamlined or used as a measurement of success for the organization. In…
This blog post will focus on loading transaction fact tables, subsequent posts for peoiodioc and accumulating snapshots will follow in the coming weeks. Loading fact…
In this blog post I will provide an example of how I implement Type II dimensions in my data warehouses. The process I go through…
Joining fact tables can be done but there are some inherent risks so you need to be careful when joining fact tables is required. In…
In this week’s blog, we will discuss constraints and indexes. In data warehousing, like in life, constraints are things we love to hate. Constraints keep…
In this week’s blog, we will discuss how to optimize the performance of your data warehouse by using aggregates. What are Aggregates? Aggregates are the…
Getting the correct answer is one of the most important requirements of a data warehouse, but this is only part of the requirement. The full…
This blog article is a follow-up to the Ragged Hierarchical Dimensions article I posted a few weeks ago. In this article, I spoke of using…
Today we will look at a different type of fact table, the accumulating fact. Accumulating Fact Tables Accumulating Fact tables are used to show the…