The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling

Chapter 9. Financial Services

The financial services industry encompasses a wide variety of businesses, including credit card companies, brokerage firms, and mortgage providers. This chapter will focus primarily on retail banks given that most readers have some degree of personal familiarity with this type of financial institution. A full-service bank offers a breadth of products, including checking accounts, savings accounts, mortgage loans, personal loans, credit cards, and safe deposit boxes. This chapter begins with a very simplistic schema. We then explore several schema extensions, including handling of the bank's broad portfolio of heterogeneous products that vary significantly by line of business.

As we embark on a series of industry-focused chapters, we want to remind you that they are not intended to provide full-scale industry solutions. While various dimensional modeling techniques will be discussed in the context of a given industry, the techniques certainly are applicable to other businesses. If you don't work in financial services, you still need to read this chapter. If you do work in financial services, remember that the schemas in this chapter should not be viewed as complete.

Note

Chapter 9 discusses the following concepts:

• Dimension triage to avoid the "too few dimensions" trap

• Household dimensions

• Associating individual customers with accounts using a bridge table

• Multiple minidimensions in a single fact table

• Value banding of facts for reporting purposes

• Point-in-time ...