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Vol. I · No. 251
Mon · 8 Jun
A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data
The Lexicon

005·14

dimensional modeling

/dɪˈmɛn.ʃə.nəl ˈmɒd.əl.ɪŋ/ - n.

1 [colloq.] Deciding what the business measures and what it measures by, then discovering nobody agrees on either.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. A design technique that organizes data into facts and dimensions to optimize a warehouse for query and analysis rather than transaction processing.

Promoted
See also
  • dimension tableWhere the company keeps every adjective it has ever applied to a customer, none of them governed.
  • fact tableThe one table everyone trusts, named for a property no one has verified.
  • grainThe question 'what does one row mean?', asked far too late and answered by whoever wrote the query.
  • star schemaA clean diagram at the center of the deck, surrounded on all sides by the joins that did not fit on the slide.