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Automating the building of BI-Solutions
Coming from a "Old fashioned" development environment (that is: C/C++, CSV, Unix and the likes) I have always wondered why BI-projects don’t seem to get the idea of a structured software development....
View ArticleDefining the Good Data Model
Designing data models is fun – at least if you are a geek like me. But as much as I like the academic thrill of building something that is complex – I am aware that it is often humans that eventually...
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An Overview of Source Key Pathologies
I previously made the point that source systems cannot be trusted to generate good keys. In this post, I will explore the pollution you may encounter as you dip your feet into the crude oil leaked...
View ArticleMicrosoft Announces Plans to Introduce Hadoop Interoperability
For those of you who have not yet seen it, Microsoft recently announced that they will be looking at Hadoop connectivity to the database stack: Parallel Data Warehouse News and Hadoop Interoperability...
View ArticleAnalysis Services Performance Guide in Final Draft
To the Analysis Services crowd out there: Last week I finished the last section of the Analysis Services 2008R2 Performance Guide. Furthermore, I reviewed my co-author Denny Lee’s sections. Denny is...
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Transforming Source Keys to Real Keys – Part 2: Using Maps To Fix Key Problems
In part 1 of this post, I introduced the idea of map tables. These tables serve as an abstraction between the source systems and the entities in the data warehouse. In this post, I will describe how...
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Why Surrogate Keys are not Good Keys
History tracking in warehouses is a controversial discipline. I this post, I will begin to unravel some of the apparent complexities by taking apart the history tracking problem, piece by piece....
View ArticleThe Data Vault vs. Kimball
Here we go again, the discussion about the claimed benefits of the Data Vault. Thomas Christensen has written some great blog posts about his take on the Vault method. Dan Linstedt has been commenting....
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Why “Date BETWEEN FromDate AND ToDate” is a dangerous join criteria
I have been meaning to write this blog post for some time and the discussion about Data Vault finally prompted me to do it. Sometimes, you find yourself in situations where you have to join a table...
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Modeling Dimensions with History Tracked, Generic Attributes
Sometimes, you need to model a database in such a way that you can dynamically extend the model without altering any tables. Perhaps the attributes changes faster than you can add new columns or the...
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