CHAPTER12Star Schema Designs for Sales Analysis
Suppose that ABC Corporation has built the data warehouse depicted in Chapter 11. Excited about the opportunity to get meaningful sales analysis information, the eastern regional sales manager has approached the IS department to see how and when the data would be available. The IS department, knowing that nothing is as simple as it seems, gathered some specific requirements. After a review of the real requirements, it was obvious that the sales manager did not need access to the entire warehouse. In fact, that would be too much information and ultimately result in confusion and dissatisfaction. IS decided the best solution was to develop a departmental data warehouse (or data mart).
The data warehouse stores all the atomic data necessary to capture all-important historic details. The data mart provides a mechanism to take a slice of this data for easy analysis by the end user. Each data mart usually takes a portion of the data warehouse and is designed to handle the needs of a specific department or part of the enterprise.
As pointed out in the previous chapters, a data warehouse is generally developed one subject area at a time. This chapter will briefly discuss possible star schema structures for a departmental warehouse containing the subject area of sales analysis to be transformed.
The purpose of the designs in this chapter is to provide an example of a department-specific data warehouse (or data mart) that could be developed ...
