Definitive Quality Solutions - Data Modelling

Dimensional data modelling is the method of structuring data in a form that lends itself to the end-users management information reporting needs, rather than that of the operational transactional structure, adopted by relational databases.

Historically databases were structured in order in a normalised form, which is very efficient on storage space, and was designed for returning single transactions at high speeds. This on-line transactional processing (OLTP) is excellent for operational purposes, for instance where a single detailed record needs to be returned quickly such as in a customer call centre. However, where every record needs to be analysed to produce information, for instance, how many customers have a certain product, OLTP structured databases are extremely inefficient. On-line analytical processing (OLAP) is the ability to perform quick analytics on large volumes of data, and its success is based upon dimensional data modelling.

A dimensional model holds various categories of data, such as time or geography, in dimension tables which are linked to the actual measures for instance number of sales of a particular product in what is known as a fact table. Storing the data in this way overcomes many problems in a fully flat table, which is the most de-normalised form of storing data - the other side of the spectrum from OLTP relational databases.

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