Re: quick FK question
From: Rumpi Gravenstein <rgravens_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:47:55 -0500
Message-ID: <9c9b9dc90912210647m27ad35a4kb34610ffe2c2c09b_at_mail.gmail.com>
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So, does your "data warehouse modeler" produce models that work well to answer the questions put to it? Does this practice tend to make the models more or less usable?
</snip>
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:47:55 -0500
Message-ID: <9c9b9dc90912210647m27ad35a4kb34610ffe2c2c09b_at_mail.gmail.com>
<snip>
So, does your "data warehouse modeler" produce models that work well to answer the questions put to it? Does this practice tend to make the models more or less usable?
</snip>
I just want to be clear here. The foreign keys do tie into records in the dimension table that have a meaning of unknown.
The answer to the question is that by and large yes, the final result is very usable. Discoverer and other reports run against it where the "unknown" dimension value can easily be selected and the report run. One never has to worry about when might an outer join be necessary. And because this is a data warehouse, with data refreshed daily, as the unknown values become known, the newly loaded values start reflecting those facts.
-- Rumpi Gravenstein -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Mon Dec 21 2009 - 08:47:55 CST