Steps of Dimensional Modeling
Explore the four-step dimensional modeling process to design effective data warehouses. This lesson guides you through selecting business processes, declaring grain, identifying dimensions, and defining fact tables, using an e-scooter rental example and hands-on BigQuery implementation.
Kimball's dimensional modeling technique is widely recognized as an industry best practice. This technique involves a four-step dimensional design process. To illustrate the process, consider the case of an e-scooter rental company. Users can rent a scooter from the street and ride to their destinations. The company wants to use generated data to make strategic decisions on demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, and operational management.
We will walk through the steps using this example and ultimately create physical tables in BigQuery.
Step 1: Select the business process
Business processes are the operational activities carried out by the organization, such as buying products, registering courses, or resolving customer tickets. First, we focus on activities that are most significant to the business.
In this example, we have several business processes in mind:
The rider ...