Saturday, March 29, 2008

Conformed Dimension

The word of Enterprise Data Warehouse is very nice at the first glance, yet when businesses want to estimate its cost, they usually prefer to have some important data marts that drive their most important business goals; in order to break its enormous cost. Beside, having these kinds of data marts could be a huge problem especially when those could not integrated with each other during the time that those are created.
Having bus architecture is undoubtedly one of the vital parts of building an enterprise data warehouse during the time, for it will provide the join possibility between the data marts by specifying the conformed dimensions.
Conformed dimensions are what which are common between data marts and make the drill across possible. Off course, it could not be eliminated from enterprise main features.
Finally, the most common problem that you may encounter during building the conformed dimensions is different level of grains that different data marts are needed, so it is recommended that you design dimension’s levels correctly which will even be helpful for drilling through actions.

3 comments:

Pedro said...

Yes! finally a post from you friend! :-)
Good and explained post. If you add aditional coments about how you create conformed dimensions in an ETL could be better!!
Thanks!!! Cheers!!!
Pedro

Amin said...

Dear Pedro,
I think there is no difference between implementing conformed dimensions and regular dimensions;
The only point is that you must be aware of the sources that you want to populate the dimension from, especially if the grain between fact tables that involve in business models are different, so in this case you have to consider the first row of each detailed rolled up dimension 's row as the surrogate key of rolled up row.

I am not sure about what I wrote in this comment, so if you thing vice versa, or if you read an article against it please tell me.

Thanks,
Amin

April 4, 2008 11:17 PM

Unknown said...

Thanks you for sharing your thought..