We have to create a Datamart containing the Customer characteristics
like 'Heavy Buyer; Chocolate lover' etc., and this has to be done by
evaluating the relevant attributes in the Data ware house tables.
But, in our case, the definition of Customer characteristics can
change occasionally based on the new market conditions.

This means that we should allow the dynamic administration of the
definition of Customer characteristics.

Please guide me on we can do this from an Application which uses the
Datamart as the backend. Do we need to write an additional software
module (for e.g. JDBC) to interpret the 'write' requests coming from
the Application, and adapt the ETL layer accordingly?

On Mar 23, 7:03*am, guser78 <qazmlp1... (AT) rediffmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Data warehouse architecture and design is a complex topic and you
would probably be better off reading a few books on the subject
because getting a truely meaningful response to such a broad question
as yours without giving any background information on the over-all
warehouse design and architecture is unlikely.

Oracle has a manual devoted to the subject of data warehousing and
there are numerous design options covered in it. Microsoft has
articles on the topic available on its web site and even though the
subject is placing a warehouse on SQL Server there are still generic
topics discussed.

HTH -- Mark D Powell --

In article <eed0e313-0f02-4a83-ba87-1623c9045ab3@
19g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>, guser78 says...
Google: "slowly changing dimensions"

GM

On Mar 24, 8:44*am, Geoff Muldoon <geoff.muld... (AT) trap (DOT) gmail.com>
wrote:
If my requirement was not understood, here is the requirement I have:
All raw tables related to the Customer are located in the
Datawarehouse, and the specific Customer characteristics for each of
the Customer should be evaluated regularly at run time, and loaded
onto the 'Datamart' tables.

My concern in the original post was more on whether I can change the
'Transform' portion at run time.

For example, I might have calculated whether a customer is a
'Chocolate lover' based on whether he is buying some specific brands.
At run time, my administrators of my 'Marketing' application should be
able to change the definition of how the 'Chocolate lover' is
calculated, maybe by adding/removing the brands, or/and by adding an
additional criteria of checking the no. of chocolate packs that were
sold out.

I went through the information on different types of SDCs that are
possible. In my case, it has to be 'Type 1' (no need to maintain the
history of changes).
I understand that this defines how the changes should be stored in the
'Datamart' for each of the load done by the ETL layer. But, my concern
is on how I can change the 'Transform' SQL statements during run time.

On Mar 24, 4:48*am, guser78 <qazmlp1... (AT) rediffmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Sounds like it should be a data issue, a join with a table of those
attributes like 'Chocolate Lover'. This is when normalization is a
good thing.

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2...s-a-sacrifice/

guser78 says...

Are you able to programmatically define the algorithm which determines the
characteristic, in conjunction with using lookup table/s (updatable by
your administrators) which stores values like threshold levels and product
lists?

Murky waters.

GM