Summary

In the business world we are witness to huge amounts of data every day. However, data by itself is of no value. Therefore we need structure data to bring it into context and get the right information in foreseeable time - a process known as dimension modelling. In dimensional modelling we firstly need to extract data from various operating and transaction systems and afterwards clean and transform the data, and store it into a data warehouse. Finally we represent the data to final users with the help of an OLAP analysis. In the lecture the following topics will be covered: definition of data warehouses; how to model dimensional architectures; what dimensions, facts, aggregated tables, types of slowly changing dimensions are; the definition and usage of an OLAP analysis; the definition and usage of ETL processes.