Degenerate Dimension
   HOME
*





Degenerate Dimension
According to Ralph Kimball, in a data warehouse, a degenerate dimension is a dimension key in the fact table that does not have its own dimension table, because all the interesting attributes have been placed in analytic dimensions. The term "degenerate dimension" was originated by Ralph Kimball. As Bob Becker says: Other uses of the term Although most writers and practitioners use the term degenerate dimension correctly, it is very easy to find misleading definitions in online and printed sources. For example, the Oracle FAQ defines a degenerate dimension as a "data dimension that is stored in the fact table rather than a separate dimension table. This eliminates the need to join to a dimension table. You can use the data in the degenerate dimension to limit or 'slice and dice' your fact table measures." This common interpretation implies that it is good dimensional modeling practice to place dimension attributes in the fact table, as long as you call them a degenerate dimension. ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Ralph Kimball
Ralph Kimball (born July 18, 1944) is an author on the subject of data warehousing and business intelligence. He is one of the original architects of data warehousing and is known for long-term convictions that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His bottom-up methodology, also known as dimensional modeling or the Kimball methodology, is one of the two main data warehousing methodologies alongside Bill Inmon. He is the principal author of the best-selling books ''The Data Warehouse Toolkit'', ''The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit'', ''The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit'' and ''The Kimball Group Reader'', published by Wiley and Sons. Career After receiving a Ph.D. in 1973 from Stanford University in electrical engineering (specializing in man-machine systems), Ralph joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). At PARC Ralph was a principal designer of the Xerox Star Workstation, the first commercial product to use mice, icons and windows. Kimball the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Data Warehouse
In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for Business reporting, reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central Repository (version control), repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise. The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems (such as marketing or sales). The data may pass through an operational data store and may require data cleansing for additional operations to ensure data quality before it is used in the DW for reporting. Extract, transform, load (ETL) and extract, load, transform (ELT) are the two main approaches used to build a data warehouse system. ETL-based data warehousing The typical extract, transform, load (ETL)-based data warehouse uses ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Fact Table
In data warehousing, a fact table consists of the measurements, metrics or facts of a business process. It is located at the center of a star schema or a snowflake schema surrounded by dimension tables. Where multiple fact tables are used, these are arranged as a fact constellation schema. A fact table typically has two types of columns: those that contain facts and those that are a foreign key to dimension tables. The primary key of a fact table is usually a composite key that is made up of all of its foreign keys. Fact tables contain the content of the data warehouse and store different types of measures like additive, non-additive, and semi-additive measures. Fact tables provide the (usually) additive values that act as independent variables by which dimensional attributes are analyzed. Fact tables are often defined by their ''grain''. The grain of a fact table represents the most atomic level by which the facts may be defined. The grain of a sales fact table might be stated as ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Dimension Table
A dimension is a structure that categorizes facts and measures in order to enable users to answer business questions. Commonly used dimensions are people, products, place and time. (Note: People and time sometimes are not modeled as dimensions.) In a data warehouse, dimensions provide structured labeling information to otherwise unordered numeric measures. The dimension is a data set composed of individual, non-overlapping data elements. The primary functions of dimensions are threefold: to provide filtering, grouping and labelling. These functions are often described as " slice and dice". A common data warehouse example involves sales as the measure, with customer and product as dimensions. In each sale a customer buys a product. The data can be sliced by removing all customers except for a group under study, and then diced by grouping by product. A dimensional data element is similar to a categorical variable in statistics. Typically dimensions in a data warehouse are organiz ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Measure (data Warehouse)
In a data warehouse, a measure is a property on which calculations (e.g., sum, count, average, minimum, maximum) can be made. Example For example, if a retail store sold a specific product, the quantity and prices of each item sold could be added or averaged to find the total number of items sold or the total or average price of the goods sold. Use of ISO representation terms When entering data into a metadata registry such as ISO/IEC 11179, representation terms such as number, value and measure are typically used as measures. See also * Data warehouse * Dimension (data warehouse) A dimension is a structure that categorizes facts and measures in order to enable users to answer business questions. Commonly used dimensions are people, products, place and time. (Note: People and time sometimes are not modeled as dimensions.) ... References * Kimball, Ralph et al. (1998); ''The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit'', p17. Pub. Wiley. . * Kimball, Ralph (1996); ''The Data Warehouse ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Data Warehousing
In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. They store current and historical data in one single place that are used for creating analytical reports for workers throughout the enterprise. The data stored in the warehouse is uploaded from the operational systems (such as marketing or sales). The data may pass through an operational data store and may require data cleansing for additional operations to ensure data quality before it is used in the DW for reporting. Extract, transform, load (ETL) and extract, load, transform (ELT) are the two main approaches used to build a data warehouse system. ETL-based data warehousing The typical extract, transform, load (ETL)-based data warehouse uses staging, data integration, and access layers to ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]