Saturday, September 8, 2018

Shrunken Dimension - Very useful for higher level summary

Shrunken Dimension is a very special type of dimension when there is a requirement of higher level of summary and lower grain data is already available in the warehouse.

Before we dive in if you do not understand what is the grain of the dimension, it is important to understand.

Month could be a shrunken dimension of date,  which could be connected to a fact which has grain of month like monthly sales. But this is a very classic example, let us deep dive a little with another example.
Considering the Online Movie Ticketing business scenario, we would have 2 tables, a fact for Ticket sales and a related dimension of the Venue for which sold the ticket. 
If customer need to view the total consolidated Sales at city level rather than Venue level, we could create a separate dimension for City and a separate fact table for Consolidated Sales. The image below demonstrates the same:
Shrunken Dimension Example

In the example above we have created a base dimension and Shrunken dimension separately. If needed we could also create the Shrunken dimension from the base dimension, once it is loaded. Again it totally depends on the business requirements and the type of source system you are dealing with.

Static Dimension in Datawarehouse

Static Dimension are not extracted from the data source, but created in warehouse itself in the context of warehouse. These are usually loaded just once, manually or by the help of a procedure. The data of this dimension does not change or changed very rarely.

A few common examples of the static dimensions would be "DIM_SOURCE_SYSTEMS", "DIM_STATUS_CODE" or date time as well.

Please do not confuse it with the SCD Type 0. In SCD type 0, we insert data regularly but never update it. Also, they are loaded with the data extracted from source.

Click here to read about the other dimensions in datawarehousing.

Sunday, September 2, 2018

Microsoft Teams is now Free - Can it be the Game Changer

Microsoft Teams is a platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. The service integrates with the company's Office 365 subscription office productivity suite, including Microsoft Office and Skype, and features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products.

Microsoft initially released in 2017, but recently Microsoft announced a free version of it, which could be very useful for new startups or educational groups which want to collaborate for free with lots of features.

So what does the free version of Microsoft teams allows you to do:
  • Add up to 300 members to collaborate with 2GB free space per user.
  • 10 GB shared storage
  • Unlimited messaging and search.
  • Secure File Sharing
  • One on one Meetings with audio and video facilities.
  • Channel Meetings for Multiple People in team
  • Screen Sharing
  • MS word, PowerPoint, excel and One Note
  • Access to 140+ other apps and services
  • All this is available over cloud, which means it is not device specific. Just login with your account and you got all you work saved using other machines.

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