More Dimension Patterns and Considerations

This chapter discusses snowflaked versus outrigger dimension tables, plus bridge tables for handling both multi‐valued dimension attributes as well as variable‐depth hierarchical relationships. It describes several patterns often observed with customer centric dimension tables. The chapter describes approaches for handling the challenges presented by the internationalization of dimensional models. It provides a series of case studies from a variety of industries and application areas‐insurance, voyage, human resources, finance, electronic commerce, text searching, and retail. When a dimension table is snowflaked, the redundant many‐to‐one attributes are removed into separate dimension tables. Multi‐valued dimensions are normally illegal in a dimensional design. The creation of robust document similarity metrics is an active research topic today, in both academic and commercial settings. The primary goal of market basket analysis is to understand the meaningful combinations of products sold together.