July 2006
Intermediate to advanced
378 pages
9h 38m
English
book
Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates: Solutions for Star Schema Performance
by Christopher Adamson
Content preview from Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates: Solutions for Star Schema Performance
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
1.1. Star Schema Basics
A star schema is a set of tables in a relational database that has been designed according to the principles of dimensional modeling. Ralph Kimball popularized this approach to data warehouse design in the 1990s. Through his work and writings, Kimball established standard terminology and best practices that are now used around the world to design and build data warehouse systems. With coauthor Margy Ross, he provides a detailed treatment of these principles in The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Second Edition (Wiley, 2002).
To follow the examples throughout this book, you must understand the fundamental principles of dimensional modeling. In particular, the reader must have a basic grasp of the following concepts:
The differences between data warehouse systems and operational systems
How facts and dimensions support the measurement of a business process
The tables of a star schema (fact tables and dimension tables) and their purposes
The purpose of surrogate keys in dimension tables
The grain of a fact table
The additivity of facts
How a star schema is queried
Drilling across multiple fact tables
Conformed dimensions and the warehouse bus
The basic architecture of a data warehouse, including ETL software and BI software
If you are familiar with these topics, you may wish to skip to the section "Invisible Aggregates," later in this chapter.
For everyone else, this section will bring you up-to-speed. Although not a substitute for Kimball and Ross's book, this overview provides ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.