I am studying data warehousing star schema and attribute hierarchies and I am getting confused because the examples of the book do not provide sample data on which to confirm my understanding of things.
In the book there is a sales data warehouse with a dimension for products that has the following attribute hierarchy:
PRODUCT(AllProducts, ByProductType, OneProduct)
See the image below:
What kind of sample data would go into the product dimension table?
PRODUCTS
AllProducts ByProductType OneProduct
? ? ?
? ? ?
? ? ?
If I’m not mistaken attributes are table columns or fields and I can’t understand how would the data look like in this table
If you take the dimension Time from the same image, data can easily be sampled:
TIME
Year Quarter Month Week
2010 1 1 1
2010 1 1 2
2010 1 1 3
2010 1 1 4
One other thing I am confused about is how the data looks like in the fact table. In the book it is stated that the fact table would deliberately contain duplicated data. For example to come up with the sales figures of a whole year there is no need to aggregate weekly sales values on the fly because they would have already been calculated. Now if in the time dimension I have a primary key value 1 that represents a year a quarter a month and a week all at once how can I hold the aggregate value of 1 whole year in the fact table?
TIME
ID Year Quarter Month Week
1 2010 1 1 1
SALES_FACT_TABLE
Sales TimeID ProductID
1000 1 ?
The greyish fields (AllProducts, OneProduct etc) in the figure are examples of queries on the products dimension, not attributes.
Attributes would be
Product.Name, Brand, SKU, InternalName, DevelopmentStartDate, OnMarketDate … whatever