Franky Leeuwerck

Let me tell you a true story about mama Natalie and her son Steve. Steve is a 14-year old, clever, young man, one of the cool guys at school. He always keeps his mobile phone at hand. As a matter of fact, he has a black belt in texting. Unfortunately, it seems that Steve’s texting behavior has been a bad influence on his grades at school. Mama Natalia suspects Steve of favoring his phone over his books. But how can she make Steve see the connection?

Not everybody tends to display information in data warehouses in the same manner. For this reason, we have created four so-called special dimension members to avoid confusion and establish some uniform ground rules.

Als je naar het ziekenhuis gaat voor een behandeling, wil je vooral weten hoe lang je er zal moeten blijven en hoeveel het zal kosten. Ook het ziekenhuis wil dit weten om de capaciteitsplanning, het dienstrooster en de financiële planning te verbeteren. Het Sint-Rembertziekenhuis in Torhout werkt daarom aan een nieuwe reeks rapporten om een beter overzicht te krijgen van de eigen activiteiten, op basis van de bestaande gegevens.

Calculations that make comparisons to previous quarters or to the same period one year ago are very important in all business intelligence tools. DAX, the formula language in PowerPivot, allows you to define such calculations by means of Time Intelligence Functions . However, in order to use these, you need to include a Date dimension table in your PowerPivot model. When you do not have access to a date table in your ICT network, you will be able to create one on the spot after reading this post.

A data warehouse is a relational database just like any other relational database. However, the database model is designed in a different way. It should facilitate business users querying large amounts of data, but also let them explore the data from different points-of-view by means of BI applications. Six steps will guide you through the design process and address some key fundamentals in data warehouse modeling. Finally, five additional tips will help you save time and money with future enhancements of your data warehouse solution.