Re: Use for CREATE DIMENSION in O10g?

Douglas,
Thanks for the response.
This sounds interesting in theory, but it seems like from a practical standpoint, as soon as the user wants a summary by year_and_quarter they would simply query a different set of columns or materialized views (or their reporting tool would on their behalf). Put another way, this feature seems to do something that was already available, and perhaps do it in a way that leads to sloppy design (much like untyped variables in a programming language).

But I could be missing something obvious. Feel free to punch me in the arm if I am.

> For example, a dimension would Oracle that a year contains many
> year_and_quarter columns which, in turn, contain many many months, etc.
If
> I have a materialized year summarized by month and I want a summary by
> year_and_quarter, then, with the dimension, the CBO would consider using
the
> materialized view as the basis for the summary, instead of using the base
> tables. Otherwise, the CBO would not consider the materialized view
because
> it has no way of knowing the relationship between the year_and_quarter and
> month columns.
Received on Thu Mar 25 2004 - 18:37:17 CST