Articles & Design Tips

Many of you are already familiar with the data warehouse bus architecture and matrix given their central role in building architected data marts. The corresponding bus matrix identifies the key business processes of an organization, along with their associated dimensions. Business processes (typically corresponding to major source systems) are listed as matrix rows, while dimensions appear as matrix […]

Contrary to William Shakespeare and some data warehouse industry pundits, that’s NOT the question. In this article, we discuss an issue faced by maturing data mart/warehouse environments. While some organizations are newcomers to the data warehouse party, others have been at this for quite a while. As the market matures, the cause of data warehouse “pain” within the […]

The acronym, SCD, is a keyword in a dimensional modeler’s vernacular. As most of you know, SCD is short-hand for slowly changing dimensions. There are several well-documented techniques for dealing with slowly changing dimension attributes. Briefly, with SCD Type 1, the attribute value is overwritten with the new value, obliterating the historical attribute values. For example, when the […]

By Margy Ross and Bob Becker During the past year, we’ve repeatedly observed a pattern with maturing data warehouses. Despite significant effort and investment, some data warehouses have fallen off course. Project teams (or their user communities) are dissatisfied with the warehouse deliverables – the data’s too confusing, it’s not consistent, queries are too slow, etc. Teams have […]

One of the most prevalent fallacies in our industry is that data marts are defined by business department. We’ve seen countless data warehouse architecture diagrams with boxes labeled “Marketing Data Mart,” “Sales Data Mart,” and “Finance Data Mart.” After reviewing business requirements from these departments, you’d inevitably learn that all three organizations want the same core information, such as […]