• free text should not be stored in the DW, it is not a member, measure or key 🙂

    If they are using some 'feature' of the free text then that should be turned into a member, measure or key as part of the ETL process.

    If they really need the text then it should be stored as attributes on the FACT record, (but you still need the member, measure or key extracted) If there is a 1..n relationship then store the data in XML in a single field (But I would still push back against this really hard!)