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

Table of Contents

Part I: Fundamentals

Chapter 1 Analytic Databases and Dimensional Design

Chapter 2 Data Warehouse Architectures

Chapter 3 Stars and Cubes

Part II: Multiple Stars

Chapter 4 A Fact Table for Each Process

Chapter 5 Conformed Dimensions

Part Ill: Dimension Design

Chapter 6 More on Dimension Tables

Chapter 7 Hierarchies and Snowflakes

Chapter 8 More Slow Change Techniques

Chapter 9 Multi-Valued Dimensions and Bridges

Chapter 10 Recursive Hierarchies and Bridges

Part IV: Fact Table Design

Chapter 11 Transactions, Snapshots. and Accumulating Snapshots

Chapter 12 Factless Fact Tables

Chapter 13 Type-Specific Stars

Part V: Performance

Chapter 14 Derived Schemas

Chapter 15 Aggregates

Part VI: Tools and Documentation

Chapter 16 Design and Business Intelligence

Chapter 17 Design and ETL

Chapter 18 How to Design and Document a Dimensional Model

About the Author

Christopher Adamson is the founder of Oakton Software LLC and a faculty member at The Data Warehousing Institute. He works with customers in all industries to establish data warehousing strategies, define and prioritize projects, and design solutions. Chris has taught dimensional design to thousands of students worldwide, and has written numerous books and articles.