loading history records into a datawarehosue

[frankmanic]

Hi all, we have a mainframe DB2 system that keeps historical data (associative entities) when key informations is changed.

Example: we have dealers that can enroll in programs over time
ID: system generated id (rowid)
effective date: the date the record became active
term date: the date teh record became inactive (current record will have a date of 12/31/9999)
foriegn key to program code: points to program table
foreign key to the dealer table: points to dealer table
userId: user which made the change
change date: date/time when change was made

we use the same construct for when dealers change districts, regions, district managers etc. and it works well for our mainframe applications.

question: how would i load this into a data warehouse? and what type of dimension would it be. (Dealers would be a dimension table and sales would be our fact table)

some team members would like to create type 2 records everytime the dealer record changes but since we already keep history on key field changes is not better to just load the history tables directly and keep the dealer record as a type 1?

 

[johnherman]

I see two dimensions, Dealer and Program, and one fact table, Sales. In addition, there will be another dimension for Dealer-Program, which contains the programs each dealer was a member of. The Dealer and Program tables can be denormalized into the Dealer-Program table, or can be lookup tables in a snowflake manner.

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