The definitive guide to dimensional design for your data warehouse
Learn the best practices of dimensional design.
Star Schema: The Complete Reference offers in-depth coverage of design principles and their underlying rationales. Organized around design concepts and illustrated with detailed examples, this is a step-by-step guidebook for beginners and a comprehensive resource for experts.
This all-inclusive volume begins with dimensional design fundamentals and shows how they fit into diverse data warehouse architectures, including those of W.H. Inmon and Ralph Kimball. The book progresses through a series of advanced techniques that help you address real-world complexity, maximize performance, and adapt to the requirements of BI and ETL software products. You are furnished with design tasks and deliverables that can be incorporated into any project, regardless of architecture or methodology.
- Master the fundamentals of star schema design and slow change processing
- Identify situations that call for multiple stars or cubes
- Ensure compatibility across subject areas as your data warehouse grows
- Accommodate repeating attributes, recursive hierarchies, and poor data quality
- Support conflicting requirements for historic data
- Handle variation within a business process and correlation of disparate activities
- Boost performance using derived schemas and aggregates
- Learn when it's appropriate to adjust designs for BI and ETL tools
Customer Reviews & Comments
This is an excellent reference guide on dimensional modeling. The book is chock full of examples (very comprehensive examples), and it is written in a very clear to the point writing style. I found myself highlighting passages, and enjoyed reading the advanced techniques such as on multi-valued dimensions and the various ways of managing history. This book assumes you know the basics of data modeling. (If you need the basics, I would make a completely unbiased recommendation for my book, Data Modeling Made Simple).
What I also like about this book is that it is architecture-independent and Chris Adamson's techniques work for various data warehouse architectures and he explains how it fits in with the more common architectures of the Hub and Bus.
I also very much appreciated the "Further Reading" sections at the end of each chapter.
