Role Playing Dimension in data warehouse

Submitted by tutorialcorner1012 on Wed, 2016-04-13 12:56
articles: 
Warehousing

Dimensions are often recycled for multiple purposes within the same database. For instance, a “Date” dimension can be used for “Date of Sale”, as well as “Date of Delivery”, or “Date of Hire”. This is often referred to as a “role-playing dimension”.

A single physical dimension can be referenced multiple times in a fact table, with each reference linking to a logically distinct role for the dimension.It is essential that each foreign key refers to a separate view of the date dimension so that the references are independent. These separate dimension views (with unique attribute column names) are called roles.

Typically dimensions in a data warehouse are organized internally into one or more hierarchies. "Date" is a common dimension, with several possible hierarchies:

"Days (are grouped into) Months (which are grouped into) Years",
"Days (are grouped into) Weeks (which are grouped into) Years"
"Days (are grouped into) Months (which are grouped into) Quarters (which are grouped into) Years"
etc.

For more details. Please check Role Playing Dimension in data warehouse

»

Comments

Submitted by John Watson on Sat, 2016-04-23 06:13.

Moderator comment: I've approved your article because it is possible that some people might find your definition of a "role-playing dimension" helpful, but it is very close to being just an advertisement for your website. Another moderator may choose to delete it.

I notice that you appear to have copied most if it from the Kimball Group website http://www.kimballgroup.com which states this:

Quote:
A single physical dimension can be referenced multiple times in a fact table, with each reference linking to a logically distinct role for the dimension. For instance, a fact table can have several dates, each of which is represented by a foreign key to the date dimension. It is essential that each foreign key refers to a separate view of the date dimension so that the references are independent. These separate dimension views (with unique attribute column names) are called roles.
In future, please credit your sources.

»

Submitted by tutorialcorner1012 on Mon, 2016-05-02 00:24.

Hi John,
Thanks for your update. Regarding Kinball, I added quotes of Kimball Sir from their site for sure. We cannot change his quotes. I didn wanted to copy whole content of mysite. I just added the summary of my post, If someone interested, he can go through full post. Please let me know if you see any issue while providing such details.

Thanks,
Alisha Lamba

»