Data descriptions sources Oracle Tips  by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

ANALYZING SOURCE DOCUMENT INPUT

ADVERTISING DATA SOURCES

As we discussed, Guttbaum’s will now require shoppers to have a Grocery Club Card if they want to take advantage of in-store sales. Figure 3.12 shows a typical in-store special for Guttbaum’s.

Figure 3.12 An in-store advertisement.

Also as we discussed, Guttbaum’s will no longer issues coupons in its newspaper advertisements--a substantial savings in costs for Guttbaum’s. However, Guttbaum’s continues to advertise Grocery Club specials in the local newspaper.

Figure 3.13 A sample newspaper advertisement.

From the in-store advertisement and the newspaper advertisement, we can derive the following data dictionary entry:

newspaper_ad =

product_name,
sale_price
size_requirement
start_date,
end_date

Now that we have created data descriptions for each source document, you might think we are prepared to take these logical data descriptions into the data warehouse design phase. But are we done with data analysis? Not quite yet. Let’s investigate the need to capture external information for our new data warehouse. By external information, I’m talking about data that resides outside of Guttbum’s databases.

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This is an excerpt from "High Performance Data Warehousing", copyright 1997.

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