Category: data warehousing

In a previous post, I showed that costs data may be allocated to other departments or levels of granularity to enable cost analysis. The allocated cost data are artificial data: the data are only a part of costs for which the data are collected at other levels of the organisation, These data are then intermediate…

In most organisations, cost data are collected on a different level of granularity or attached to another dimension as we would like to see the cost data. Two examples. Cost data, such as advertisements or publicity may be collected at product group level whereas we would like to present the cost data on individual products.…

I have created an example data warehouse with just one dimension table and one fact table. We have discussed how the dimension table must be loaded. Once the dimension table is loaded, we may start loading the fact table. Let us see how that is done. The fact table looks like: create table devADW_BAN_MI.factTARGET (PI…

In the last week, I have written a sample script to create a skeleton data warehouse. I will use this as a head start for future work where the skeleton will be used to implement an actual data warehouse. The skeleton is written for a Teradata DBMS. This is the platform that I currently use.…

Yesterday evening, I received a copy of Expressor. This is a free ETL tool which made a very good impression to me. I downloaded the copy from http://www.expressor-software.com . The download and subsequent installation is very simple. The file to be downloaded is about a 100MB and the installation is straightforward: some legal screens and…

In the test phase, we would like to create a nice list of encountered bugs. In most situations a project assistant is given the task to maintain this list. All encountered bugs are sent to him. He compiles a list. This list is then maintained to see which bugs are solved and which bugs are…

Last week, I gave a course on data warehousing. When I overviewed the theory, I noticed I had to spend some time on “disabling the the referential integrity constraints”. I realised that I had to provide a clear explanation on what is meant by this. The idea is rather straight forward. When we load sverela…

Oracle has a feature it is possible to create tamporary tables. The idea is that a table can be created, can be populated with data, but these data can only be seen during the session. Other sessions do see the table but they see no rows. Even if someone uses the same userid as the…

I hope you recognise the situation. You have developed some SAS code (in Enterprise Guide, SAS Base Editor or DI Studio) and you would like to create a batch job from this. Huh? SAS seems to offer you only the possibility to run a job interactively. However, it is possible to run a job in…