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Issue 16.5 ('Spreadsheet Databases')
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Ragged Hierarchies in Data Marts

How to deal with hierarchies in a data mart

Issue: 16.5 (September/October 2018)
Author: Craig Boyd
Author Bio: Craig Boyd is currently a data architect for a major fashion retail brand. But in his 23 years of IT experience, he has been everything from a PC Technician, iSeries System Administrator, iSeries Programmer, Sr. Technical Lead, Data Modeler, Data Architect, Oracle DBA, BI Consultant and Solution Architect. He lives in the great state of Texas with his wife and two kids.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,648
Starting Page Number: 82
Article Number: 16507
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Excerpt of article text...

In times past we have discussed hierarchies. Mostly this was in the context of how to deal with hierarchies in OLTP databases and the accompanying SQL. In this month's column we are going to touch on them again, but in the context of a data mart.

Generally speaking, you have two kinds of tables in a data mart: Facts and Dimensions. Facts are usually numeric facts. For example, you may have a FACT_SALES table that has ORDER_AMOUNT, TOTAL_ITEMS_ORDERED, SHIPPING_LOCATION_COUNT, etc.

A Dimension is where the columns that would usually be part of the WHERE clause of SQL statement would be found. For example, for a DIM_STORE table you would have columns like: STORE_NUMBER, OPENING_DATE, STORE_TYPE, DOOR_COUNT, SQUARE_FEET, etc.

There is a third kind of table that will sometimes exist in data marts and that is a Bridge table. Bridge tables are exactly what they sound like: they bridge two other tables together in order to resolve a many-to-many relationship. We will discuss examples of this shortly.

Hierarchies in a data mart will end up in a dimension table. Ralph Kimball in his book The Data Warehouse Toolkit (3rd ed., p.57) identifies the following kinds of dimensional hierarchies:

  • Fixed Depth Positional Hierarchies

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