Skip to Main Content
The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling, 3rd Edition
book

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

by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross
July 2013
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
600 pages
17h 31m
English
Wiley
Content preview from The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling, 3rd Edition

Chapter 15

Electronic Commerce

A web-intensive business's clickstream data records the gestures of every web visitor. In its most elemental form, the clickstream is every page event recorded by each of the company's web servers. The clickstream contains a number of new dimensions, such as page, session, and referrer, which are not found in other data sources. The clickstream is a torrent of data; it can be difficult and exasperating for DW/BI professionals. Does it connect to the rest of the DW/BI system? Can its dimensions and facts be conformed in the enterprise data warehouse bus architecture?

We start this chapter by describing the raw clickstream data source and designing its relevant dimensional models. We discuss the impact of Google Analytics, which can be thought of as an external data warehouse delivering information about your website. We then integrate clickstream data into a larger matrix of more conventional processes for a web retailer, and argue that the profitability of the web sales channel can be measured if you allocate the right costs back to the individual sales.

Chapter 15 discusses the following concepts:

  • Clickstream data and its unique dimensionality
  • Role of external services such as Google Analytics
  • Integrating clickstream data with the other business processes on the bus matrix
  • Assembling a complete view of profitability for a web enterprise

Clickstream Source Data

The clickstream is not just another data source that is extracted, cleaned, and dumped ...

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.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Fundamentals of Data Engineering

Fundamentals of Data Engineering

Joe Reis, Matt Housley
Fundamentals of Data Engineering

Fundamentals of Data Engineering

Joe Reis, Matt Housley

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781118530801Purchase book