Re: Announcing the "Instant Data Warehouse" Product

In Message-ID: <4g4ajn$his_at_oznet07.ozemail.com.au>, Peter Nolan <pnolan_at_ozemail.com.au> writes:

<<One of the great features of a properly implemented star schema is the fact that the summary fact tables can be implemented as 'multi-level' summary tables. This means that you can have many levels of aggregation in the one table and the user is never aware of this. Hence there is no need to understand which tables/views to look at, it is all taken care of. When you want a new summary there are no new objects to create.>>

We call this setup the "consolidated star" and it is classic Metaphor. Information Advantage seems to prefer this setup too and unless I'm mistaken, actually requires it (or at least a view that looks like it). My problem with it is that it slows down queries at aggregate levels, since we have to query a much large fact table, instead of a much smaller one. It also complicates the creation and maintenace of aggregates at load time, but it does vastly simplify the maintenance of metadata. Tradeoffs. Each situation needs to be evaluated by someone who understands the differences.    

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_/ Neil Raden - nraden_at_ix.netcom.com ; URL (temporary)
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_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ Received on Sun Feb 18 1996 - 00:00:00 CET