Building Fast —Data Warehouse Schemas: Part 2 Optimize the design of your data warehouse dimension tables

摘要

My last column discussed why and how we use dimensional modeling to organize the data in a data warehouse. To briefly reiterate, the goal of a data warehouse is to give users fast access to data so they can make better business decisions, and to give them a separate area to run queries and to play with data that doesn't affect the operational database. Dimensional modeling helps us optimize our warehouse data for queries and analysis. A dimensional model has three key parts: the fact tables, the dimension tables, and the summary tables. We have already covered fact tables, so in this column we will look at how to design dimension tables.