Building an effective data model

From our previous discussion and after analyzing the data, we have concluded that our data is structured, so it’s suitable for being stored in a relational data model. From the requirements, we have gathered that our final data store should be a data warehouse. Keeping these two basic factors in mind, let’s learn about relational data warehouse schemas.

Relational data warehouse schemas

Let’s explore the popular relational data warehouse schemas that we can consider when creating our data model:

• Star schema: This is the most popular data warehouse schema type. As shown in the following diagram, there is a Fact Table in the middle where each record represents a fact or an event that has happened over time:

Figure 4.8 – Star schema

This Fact Table consists of various dimensions whose details need to be looked up from associated lookup tables called dimension tables. This Fact Table...