winston Smith (3/4/2015)

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Martin Schoombee (3/4/2015)

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winston Smith (3/4/2015)

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We are figuring what type of data constitutes master data for our organization. At present we are dealing with just one entity - Person.

A person can be an applicant when we first become aware of them. After the application process they can become nothing (they don't progress further), or they can become an employee, student, intern etc).

So now I have a person entity.

I have a related PersonType entity.

It would also be good to store the duration a person spent as a particular PersonType.

Besides fact data, this is all looking very much like a data warehouse, and honestly, something I could much easier without trying to shoehorn it into MDS.

Am I taking a wrong approach here? Do I need to look at the problem in a different way?

In my opinion, MDS provides a good platform to store and maintain your "Person" entity. But it is still going to be in normalized form, and would probably be the source of your data warehouse where you'd track the changes over time.

Hope this makes sense and helps?

That makes sense.

To be sure an example would work as follows:

Person A is stored in MDS with an attribute of Applicant.

When they change to Employee, the attribute is updated to Employee, and the DWH then worries about tracking the change.

i.e. MDS is a Snapshot in time of all persons and their type, but the DWH can show their history.