The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Inventory

In Chapter 3: Retail Sales, we developed a dimensional model for the sales transactions in a large grocery chain. We remain within the same industry in this chapter but move up the value chain to tackle the inventory process. The designs developed in this chapter apply to a broad set of inventory pipelines both inside and outside the retail industry.

More important, this chapter provides a thorough discussion of the enterprise data warehouse bus architecture. The bus architecture is essential to creating an integrated DW/BI system. It provides a framework for planning the overall environment, even though it will be built incrementally. We will underscore the importance of using common conformed dimensions and facts across dimensional models, and will close by encouraging the adoption of an enterprise data governance program.

Chapter 4 discusses the following concepts:

• Representing organizational value chains via a series of dimensional models
• Semi-additive facts
• Three fact table types: periodic snapshots, transaction, and accumulating snapshots
• Enterprise data warehouse bus architecture and bus matrix
• Opportunity/stakeholder matrix
• Conformed dimensions and facts, and their impact on agile methods
• Importance of data governance

Value Chain Introduction

Most organizations have an underlying value chain of key business processes. The value chain identifies the natural, logical flow of an organization's primary activities. For example, a retailer issues purchase ...