data-warehouse

NoSQL for filesystem storage organization and replication?

We've been discussing design of a data warehouse strategy within our group for meeting testing, reproducibility, and data syncing requirements. One of the suggested ideas is to adapt a NoSQL approach using an existing tool rather than try to re-implement a whole lot of the same on a file system. I don't know if a NoSQL approach is even...

Star schema [fact 1:n dimension]...how?

I am a newcomer to data warehouses and have what I hope is an easy question about building a star schema: If I have a fact table where a fact record naturally has a one-to-many relationship with a single dimension, how can a star schema be modeled to support this? For example: Fact Table: Point of Sale entry (the measurement is Dollar...

Star schema [fact 1:n dimension]...how?

I am a newcomer to data warehouses and have what I hope is an easy question about building a star schema: If I have a fact table where a fact record naturally has a one-to-many relationship with a single dimension, how can a star schema be modeled to support this? For example: Fact Table: Point of Sale entry (the measurement is Dollar...

Question about Reporting and Data Warehousing Software bundled with SQL Server 2005

We currently use SQL Server 2005 Enterprise for our fairly large application, that has its roots in pre SQL Server 7.0. The tables are normalized and designed mainly for the application. The developers for the most part have the legacy SQL Server mindset. Only using the part of TSQL that existed back in 7.0, not using any of the new f...

Updating data from several different sources

I'm in the process of setting up a database with customer information. The database will handle customer data (customer id, address, phonenr etc.) as well as some basic information about which kind of advertisement a specific customer has been subjected to, and how they reacted to it. The data will be maintained both from a central data...

In a star schema, are foreign key constraints between facts and dimensions neccessary?

I'm getting my first exposure to data warehousing, and I’m wondering is it necessary to have foreign key constraints between facts and dimensions. Are there any major downsides for not having them? I’m currently working with a relational star schema. In traditional applications I’m used to having them, but I started to wonder if they wer...

Can't find data_warehouse ruby gem.

I am working on a project and i was trying make it up and running in my local machine. But unfortunately the app is using a gem data_warehouse( found gem 'data_warehouse', '= 1.5.2' in environment.rb), I tried to look for this gem but can't find this gem, I was unable to run the application because of this. I never used data warehousing ...

Google analytics-style custom report builder UI

I'm looking for a reporting engine/UI that can be integrated into a product, which has a UI along the lines of Google Analytics' Custom Reports builder. Is anyone aware of such a thing? The data is in our case is not page views/visitors/etc, but is similar in nature, in that there are limited entities or types of data, but each entity h...

Which is the best data-warehousing tool to learn in the present market?

I am graduating soon in electrical engineering. I would like to learn a data-warehousing tool. Which of the following would you suggest I learn to help me advance my career, bearing in mind I don't have a computer science degree? business objects; informatica; hyperion; datastage cognos ...

Avoid writing SQL queries altogether in SSIS

Working on a Data Warehouse project, the guy that gave us the tutorial advised that we stick to using SQL queries over defining a lot of data flow transformations, citing points like it'll consume a lot of memory on the ETL box so we'd rather leave the processing to the DB box. Is this really advisable? Where's the balance between relyin...

How to extract data from Google Analytics and build a data warehouse (webhouse) from it?

I have click stream data such as referring URL, top landing pages, top exit pages and metrics such as page views, number of visits, bounces all in Google Analytics. There is no database yet where all this information might be stored. I am required to build a data warehouse from scratch(which I believe is known as web-house) from this dat...

Good, active forum on data warehousing

I've been in the data warehousing business for 15+ years and, apart from the Kimball institute and a few blogs, I've yet to find a vital online community for data warehousing topics. Am I missing out on something or will I need to build it myself? ...

DataWarehouse - What is a good definition?

Could someone give me a good, practical definition of what a data warehouse is? ...

What data structures and algorithms are applied within data warehouse cubes?

I understand that cubes are optimized data structures for aggregating and "slicing" large amounts of data. I just don't know how they are implemented. I can imagine a lot of this technology is proprietary, but are there any resources that I could use to start implementing my own cube technology? Set theory and lots of math are probabl...

Data Warehouse: One Database or many?

At my new company, they keep all data associated with the data warehouse, including import, staging, audit, dimension and fact tables, together in the same physical database. I've been a database developer for a number of years now and this consolidation of function and form seems counter to everything I know. It seems to make securi...

How to write these two queries for a simple data warehouse, using ANSI SQL?

I am writing a simple data warehouse that will allow me to query the table to observe periodic (say weekly) changes in data, as well as changes in the change of the data (e.g. week to week change in the weekly sale amount). For the purposes of simplicity, I will present very simplified (almost trivialized) versions of the tables I am us...

Database warehouse design: fact tables and dimension tables

I am building a poor man's data warehouse using a RDBMS. I have identified the key 'attributes' to be recorded as: sex (true/false) demographic classification (A, B, C etc) place of birth date of birth weight (recorded daily): The fact that is being recorded My requirements are to be able to run 'OLAP' queries that allow me to: 's...

Infor PM (Business Intelligence solution)

We are currently implementing the commercial Infor PM (Performance Management) package as a business intelligence tool. Infor PM website It is apparently used by over 1,000 companies around the world, but I have found scant information about it on the net except for what's on their own website. It covers the whole range of data wareho...

Loading Dimension Tables - Methodologies

Hello, Recently I been working on project, where need to populated Dim Tables from EDW Tables. EDW Tables are of type II which does maintain historical data. When comes to load Dim Table, for which source may be multiple EDW Tables or would be single table with multi level pivoting (on attributes). Mean: There would be 10 records - ...

When is the Data Vault model the right model for a data-warehouse?

I recently found a reference to 'Data Vault Modeling' as a model for data-warehouses. The models I've seen before are Inmon and Kimball. The author refers to possible performance problems due to the joins needed. It looks like a nice model, but I wonder about the gotcha's. Are there any experience reports on-line? ...