Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
What Are the Time and Place Dependencies of Product Sales?
Identifying Relevant Information
To answer the question, “What are the time and place dependencies of product
sales?”, the data warehousing team decided to design a report that reports sales across
a time dimension and a geographic dimension. The following display shows an example
of such a report.
Display 5.7
Time and Place Dependencies for Sales Report
The next step is to identify how such a report could be created.
Identifying Sources
Further questioning of the executive team revealed that it would be helpful to track
sales across a customer dimension and an internal organization dimension as well as
across the dimensions of time and geography. Questions that require multiple
dimensions to be analyzed together can often be answered with online analytical
processing (OLAP). Accordingly, the data warehousing team concluded that the
question, “What are the time and place dependencies of product sales?”, could be
answered most efficiently with OLAP.
The data warehouse team examined existing tables to determine whether they could
be used as inputs to an OLAP data store that would produce reports similar to the
report shown in Display 5.7 on page 49. They identified several tables that could be
used. These tables are described in the following sections.
Sources Related to Customers
The following tables can contribute to the customer dimension of the OLAP data
store:
CUSTOMER table
CUSTOMER_TYPE table
Search WWH ::
Custom Search