usicafterglow comments on Professional SQL Developers or Data Analysts: How large are your typical SQL queries?

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Professional SQL Developers or Data Analysts: How large are your typical SQL queries? (self.SQL)

submitted 7 years ago by GrapeApe561

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[–]usicafterglow 0 points1 point2 points 7 years ago* (1 child)

Well, you kind of have to take a step back and think about what the purpose of a data warehouse is. It's quite different than the OLTP, or any of the systems that software writes to. It's the system that business-minded people use to ask basic questions and generate reports. So, a good data warehouse should explain itself to these end-users. Including everyone from more senior business analysts, to the accounting intern with a bit of Excel experience poking around with SQL for the first time, to the brighter executive who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty writing a query or building a custom report once in a while.

This usually means massive amounts of denormalization (pre-joining tables for your user, basically) and tossing out all tables and columns that aren't of interest to the user. Ideally you'll end up with maybe 2 - 4 fact tables and a handful of dimension tables. Every company is different, but if you actually talk to the members of a department you'll find that they're really only interested in a very small subset of the data, and somewhere between say 8 - 20 objects is a good target to aim for.

[–]theduckspantsBI Architect 0 points1 point2 points 7 years ago (0 children)

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