Date Concepts

[Quoted] [Quoted] I work for a small health insurance company in the Northwest. We are [Quoted] in the process of designing a data warehouse/operational data store. Our consultants recommended a data store at first because we kept saying we need detail information. We also need history information, which they say is a data warehouse.

According to them, a traditional data warehouse is just a series of current snapshots of the data (time slices). That's well and good, except in the insurance business, a subscriber may call up on the 15th of the month and say cancel my insurance as of November 1st. So we cancel him effective 11/1. If we went with a traditional dw, the snapshot on 11/1 would show him active, the snapshot on the 15th would show him terminated on the 1st.

In this scenario, if a user decided to do some reporting and chose the 11/1 time slice to report on, they would be looking at incorrect data, because actually there was one less person effective on that day. But that information wasn't captured till the 15th.

[Quoted] So how do you resolve this?? I'm sure we aren't the only ones that have crossed this bridge. Do you go back and correct the 11/1 time slice?? (I understand that's taboo).

[Quoted] [Quoted] I also have another question on this time slice thing. Say I have table that contains 12 months of summarized claims payments for each doctor. Each record has 12 buckets, one for each month of the year. (I understand this is the kind of thing you want in a DW). Each month you plop the new summarized amount into the appropriate bucket. So in the dw time slice for Jan you capture the Jan bucket. On Jan 15 (the second time slice) do you capture the Jan bucket again?? Then you have redundant data if you try and do any trending analysis through the time slices. What about on Feb 1st, do you capture the Jan and the Feb bucket??

[Quoted] [Quoted] I guess I need to see some practical examples of this? If I can't figure out how this works, I sure can't explain it to the users!

Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated!

Debbie Shaver
rdshaver_at_tscnet.com Received on Thu Nov 07 1996 - 00:00:00 CET