Temporal Snapshot Fact Table
You are designing a BI Solution and your customer ask you to keep a snapshot of the
status of all their documents (orders, insurances, contracts, bills...whatever
the word "document" may mean) for all the days of the year. They have millions of documents
and they want to have in their Data Warehouse all the data they have gathered
right from the very first operating day.
If you have 1 million of documents (on average) and you have to keep a snapshot of
them for each one of the 365 days in a year, and you have 10 year of history,
you're going to have a 3 billions table just to start with. That's a very big
and challenging number, and you may have not the option to buy a Parallel Data Warehouse.
In this session, we'll see how we can turn the usual snapshot tables into temporal
table so that we can store time intervals in order to avoid data duplication,
while keeping the Data Warehouse design usable by Analysis Services (that
doesn't know what an interval is) and optimizing it to have very good performance even on standard hardware.
The explained technique is a result of several month of research and has been
applied to the Data Warehouse of an insurance company where we had to deal with
two times the number said before.
Davide Mauri
Davide Mauri - MVP on SQL Server - has worked with SQL Server since version 6.5, and his interests cover the whole platform, from the Relational Engine to Analysis Services, from architecture definition to performance tuning. He also has a strong knowledge of XML, .NET and the Object Oriented Design principles, which allows him to have the correct vision and experience to handle development of complex Business Intelligence solutions. Having worked as a Microsoft Certified Teacher for many years, Davide is able to pass all his knowledge to his co-workers, allowing his team to deliver high-quality solutions. He currently works as a Mentor for SolidQ and can be found speaking in many Italian and internationals events.
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