DataSense

I am often asked usually by programmers - What is Data Warehousing & how do I learn it? I explain to them we use all the same tools that you do but differently. That’s when I coined the term Data Sense. It describes the essence of Data Warehousing and separates Data Warehousing from rest of Programming. Every aspect of IT from Hardware / Software infrastructure to Design, Development and QA is done with massive data flows and need for data precession accuracy and meaning.

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Basics of Dimensional Modeling

A data warehouse answers a particuler set of business questions. The questions will have variables like sales, profit, location. If you think deep you will recognise that there are two types of variables - those that represent or measure the business and those that are parameters that influence thew business. The former are facts and the latter are dimensions. Or to be more clear the former are attributes of Fact Entity (s) and the latter are Dimension Entities. - NOTE the difference in the defnition. This is crucial to arrive at a simple dimensional data warehouse data model. The data model is the heart of the data warehouse - NOT the ETL.
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