Category Archives: Data Warehousing

Nulls are evil (or at the very least mischievous)

If you have been involved in hands on database development for a while, or in any kind of BI / reporting initiative, you probably already know this. Nulls are evil (or at the very least mischievous). A null value in … Continue reading

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Medicare Advantage Enrollment Dashboard

About a month ago, my colleague, Josh Tapley (http://data-ink.com/) and I set out to build an Xcelsius based BI application. Our goals were to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology, when combined with some fundamental data warehousing and BI techniques … Continue reading

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Time lapse or high speed your business processes with history preservation techniques

High speed and time lapse photography are two techniques that allow us to understand the world around us by slowing down or speeding up processes that we could otherwise not be able to observe. High speed photography allows us to … Continue reading

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Why Isn’t Data Enrichment A Standard Practice In Every Data Warehousing Project?

Data enrichment is a terrific way to increase the value proposition of your data warehouse, and yet, it is implemented quite rarely. With data enrichment you can almost overnight provide your sales team with additional mountains of information about the … Continue reading

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Abusing the date dimension: when does it make sense to NOT use it

The date dimension is a dimensional model staple. You will not find a data mart, data warehouse or any kind of a reporting database that does not have one form or another of a date dimension. The benefits of using … Continue reading

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Why Data Modeling Fall Sideways?

One of the most surprising aspects I have come to expect during the years of data integration and warehousing consulting is how little data modeling is actually being practiced in this field. While it is hard to find a database … Continue reading

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Naming Conventions In The Data Mart

What you call things matter. It matters to you, and it matters to others who interact with you. When you name things, your project, your children, your children’s stuffed animals, you typically consider two perspectives: what YOU think the name … Continue reading

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