process of warehouse design

摘自《Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques》

 

In general, the warehouse design process consists of the following steps:

1. Choose a business process to model, for example, orders, invoices, shipments,inventory, account administration, sales, or the general ledger. If the business process is organizational and involves multiple complex object collections, a data warehouse model should be followed. However, if the process is departmental and focuses on the analysis of one kind of business process, a data mart model should be chosen.

 

2. Choose the grain of the business process. The grain is the fundamental, atomic level of data to be represented in the fact table for this process, for example, individual transactions, individual daily snapshots, and so on.

3. Choose the dimensions that will apply to each fact table record. Typical dimensions are time, item, customer, supplier, warehouse, transaction type, and status.

4. Choose the measures that will populate each fact table record. Typical measures are numeric additive quantities like dollars sold and units sold.