We characterize the ETL system as a back room activity that users should never see nor touch. Even so, the ETL system design must be driven from user requirements. This Design Tip looks at the design of one bit of ETL plumbing – the fact table surrogate key pipeline – from the perspective of business […]

This Design Tip continues our series on how to implement common dimensional design patterns in your ETL system. The relationship between a fact table and its dimensions is usually many-to-one. That is, one row in a dimension, such as customer, can have many rows in the fact table, but one row in the fact table should belong to […]

This Design Tip continues my series on implementing common ETL design patterns. These techniques should prove valuable to all ETL system developers, and, we hope, provide some product feature guidance for ETL software companies as well. Recall that a shrunken dimension is a subset of a dimension’s attributes that apply to a higher level of […]

This Design Tip describes how to create and manage mini-dimensions. Recall that a mini-dimension is a subset of attributes from a large dimension that tend to change rapidly, causing the dimension to grow excessively if changes were tracked using the Type 2 technique. By extracting unique combinations of these attribute values into a separate dimension, […]

This article describes six key decisions that must be made while crafting the ETL architecture for a dimensional data warehouse. These decisions have significant impacts on the upfront and ongoing cost and complexity of the ETL solution and, ultimately, on the success of the overall BI/DW solution. Read on for Kimball Group’s advice on making […]

The Kimball Group has been exposed to hundreds of successful data warehouses. Careful study of these successes has revealed a set of extract, transformation, and load (ETL) best practices. We first described these best practices in an Intelligent Enterprise column three years ago. Since then we have continued to refine the practices based on client […]

In this white paper, Ralph proposes a comprehensive architecture for capturing data quality events, as well as measuring and ultimately controlling data quality in the data warehouse. This scalable architecture can be added to existing data warehouse and data integration environments with minimal impact and relatively little upfront investment. Using this architecture, it is even […]