RE: data warehousing desing - to denormalize or not to denormaliz

From: Gurelei <gurelei_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 13:28:57 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.0045EB02.20020510132857@fatcity.com>

• DENNIS WILLIAMS <DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM> wrote:
  > The key point is your users. A typical normalized
  > design means a lot of
  > tables. These tables must be joined in specific
  > manners. Non-I.S. users find
  > this intimidating. So they don't use it. So you've
  > spent a lot of time
  > creating a DW only to have nobody use it.
  > How many tables
  > did your 3nf schema
  > produce?
  

Our schema has 4 fact tables, 6 aggregates build on them and more than 20 dimension tables. And we have exctly the situation of users asking to denormalize them to simplify the report creation.

> Or go ahead, build a normalized one, then > study
and
> build the second
> version incorporating the hard-won lessons others
> have learned.

What I'm trying to do is to pick the best "starting point" design. Having a totally normalized schema would be one option. If the performance or report creation (in terms of simplisity) prove unsatisfactory we can change the design and denormalize to address the known issues. If however I'm able to identify the tables that can be denormalized without causing damage I'd rather do it now.

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Author: Gurelei
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Received on Fri May 10 2002 - 16:28:57 CDT