Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
1996: The Data Warehouse Toolkit
Ralph Kimball. The Data Warehouse Toolkit: Practical
Techniques for Building Dimensional Data Warehouses
(John Wiley, 1996). This topic, and later “data warehouse toolkit”
books, introduced and developed Kimball's event-centric approach
to managing historical data. Concepts such as dimensional data
marts, the fact vs. dimension distinction, and star schemas and
snowflake schemas are all grounded in Kimball's work, as is the
entire range of OLAP and business intelligence software.
2000: Developing Time-Oriented Database
Applications in SQL
R. T. Snodgrass. Developing Time-Oriented Database Appli-
cations in SQL (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2000). Both this topic and our
own are concerned with explaining how to support bi-temporal
data management using current DBMSs and current SQL.
This topic is an invaluable source of SQL code fragments that
illustrate the complexity of managing bi-temporal data and, in
particular, that illustrate how to write temporal entity integrity
and temporal referential integrity checks.
This topic is available in PDF form, at no cost, at
Dr. Snodgrass's website:
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/
2000: Primary Key Reengineering Projects
Tom Johnston. “Primary Key Reengineering Projects: The
Problem.” Information Management Magazine (February 2000).
Tom Johnston. “Primary Key Reengineering Projects: The Solu-
tion.” Information Management Magazine (March 2000).
http://
These two articles, by one of the authors, explain why he
believes that all relational tables should use surrogate keys rather
than business keys. Additional material on this topic can be
found at his website,
MindfulData.com
.
For anyone con-
templating the idea of an Asserted Versioning Framework of
their own, in which they use business keys as primary keys
instead of Asserted Versioning's object identifiers (oids), we
recommend that you read these articles first.
