Training Course : Dimensional Modeling for Beginners

09
May 2012
Event
09 May, 2012
02:00 to 00:00
Hasselt, Belgium

Because of a lack of offerings in the Belgian market, element61 has decided to develop a training on Dimensional Modeling, together with Bi-Community. Details on the training objectives and target audience can be found below. For more information contact Stijn Vermeulen at stijn.vermeulen@element61.be.

Course description

Dimensional models constitute the beating heart of any sound Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing system. In other words the quality and the final acceptance of our Business Intelligence solution is uttermost dependent on the quality of the dimensional models.

In essence dimensional modeling boils down to logically modeling the business requirements. It is however quite different from normalized modeling as we are used to in an ERP/OLTP-like situation.

This 2-day course on dimensional modeling is based on Ralph Kimball’s book, the Data Warehouse Toolkit. The course will take off by explaining the fundamentals in terms of dimensions & facts and the corresponding dimensional process. It will offer a view on tools & templates which can be used to accelerate & document. But it will also delve deeper into amongst others history tracking, the various existing fact-types, multi-valued dimensions, heterogeneous dimensions and facts. Throughout the course special situations are discussed and a number of exercises, based on real-world cases, are given. In short, a full understanding of dimensional modeling techniques, which are required to design a successful relational dimensional model based on the Kimball star schema techniques, is offered.

To avoid confusion, this course will not deal with matters such as architecture or Data Vault techniques.

Duration

1 or 2 days (in combination with Day 2 : Advanced Dimensional Modeling)

Learning outcomes

The dimensional training will handle all of the underneath topics.

 

  • Data warehouse introduction
  • OLTP versus dimensional modeling
  • Dimensional process + methodology
  • Facts & dimensions characteristicsUse of surrogate keys
  • Visual aids: information matrix, standardization, naming conventions, data modeling tools
  • Dimension examples
  • Fact examples

Target audience

This course is intended towards professionals with very little to no knowledge of modeling in the context of Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence. This includes data architects, data modelers, business analysts, business intelligence designers, project managers, DW/BI developers. This course is ideally the a first day of a 2 day course on Dimensional modeling, in combination with "Advanced Data Modeling”,

Prerequisites

Suggested prerequisites: General Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence knowledge. No dimensional modeling prerequisites.

Format

The training consists mainly of plenary lecturing with a limited set of additional exercises.

Trainer

Werner Engelen has been active in Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence since 1998. He has worked as DW & BI consultant for respected firms like amongst others Oracle, PwC Consulting & IBM Global Business Services. Since 2008, he is working as a Senior Performance Management Architect for element61 in the areas of project management & methodologies, business analysis, dimensional modeling, ETL design and data quality. In his spare time, Werner is an acclaimed photographer.