Sales Organisation Product Organisation Time KPIs Sales Department Material Group Year Sales Amount

Sales Person Material Type Month Sales Quantity Material Day A multi-step multi-dimensional analysis
will look like this: 1. Show me the Sales Amount by Sales Department by Material Group by Month 2.
Show me the Sales Amount for a specific Sales Department X by Material by Month A DataStore object
may serve to report on a single record (event) level such as: Show yesterdays Sales Orders for Sales
Person Y. This does not mean that sales order level data cannot reside in an InfoCube but rather that
this is dependent upon particular information needs and navigation. To summarize this simple example,
two basic data modeling guidelines can be made:

Analytical processing (OLAP) is normally done using InfoCubes. DataStore objects should not be misused
for multi-dimensional analysis.

There are no hard and fast rules about the architecture of an enterprise data warehouse and this will
not be discussed in any further detail here. It is important to bear in mind that this document deals only
with the building of the Architected Data Mart layer with reusable BI Content objects, namely InfoCubes,
with master data, and (external) hierarchies.

This document is organized the following way: In Chapter 2 this document provides initial information
concerning the transition from an information need to the common multi-dimensional data model / Star
schema. As the BI data model is based on the Star schema, an introduction to the Star schema will also
be given and some general aspects explained. Readers, who are familiar with the concepts of the multi-
dimensional data model and the Star schema, may therefore want to skip this introducing Chapter 2.
The BI data model is explained in detail in Chapter 3, where modeling aspects that are derived directly
from the BI data model are also explained. Chapter 4 deals with several specific aspects in the BI data
model (e.g. data modeling for time dependent analysis, hierarchical data) and further demands which
might have to be designed with BI.

BI Data Modeling Guidelines within this document:

Important BI Data Modeling Guidelines within this document are always marked by shadowed text
boxes.

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2 Theoretical Background: From Multi-Dimensional Model to InfoCube

This chapter deals with the basic stages of multi-dimensional data modeling to foster a basic
understanding for the more detailed discussions that follow. The experienced reader may therefore
want to skip this chapter.
2.1 The goals of multi-dimensional data models