After years of dormancy, there have been renewed rumblings in the DW/BI industry about the Kimball versus Inmon approaches. When I mentioned the resurrected debate to a former colleague who’s been away from our industry for nearly 15 years, she replied, “Again?!” I’m experiencing a serious case of déjà vu. In fact, we’ve been contacted […]

The logical dimensional model should be developed jointly by representatives from all interested groups: business users, reporting teams, and the DW/BI project team. It is important that the appropriate individuals are represented on the dimensional data model design team as described in Design Tip #103 in order to achieve an effective design. The best dimensional […]

Some clients and students lament that while they want to deliver and share consistently-defined master conformed dimensions in their data warehouse/business intelligence (DW/BI) environments, it’s “just not feasible.” They explain that they would if they could, but with senior management focused on using agile development techniques to deliver DW/BI solutions, it’s “impossible” to take the […]

Factless fact table are“fact tables that have no facts but captures the many-to-many relationship between dimension keys.” We’ve previously discussed factless fact tables to represent events or coverage information. An event-based factless fact table is student attendance information; the grain of the fact table is one row per student each day. A typical coverage factless fact […]