June 3, 2015 at 7:02 am
Im building a star schema to allow reporting against usage of an application, but have hit a stumbling block on two points:
-Some answers can be free text.
-I need to report on what questions were not answered by what users.
To elaborate:
Application has a section where user answers questions.
A question can have the following types of answers:
- multiple choice (radio buttons), chose 1 out of 4.
- multiple choice (tick box), chose one or more of the following.
- free text (text box), what are your thoughts on...? or if "other" radio button is chosen.
I was considering just a questions dimension, and an answers dimension.
The problem with this is the free text will pollute the answers dimension with lots of answers that are specific to only one user on one question.
This model also means that there is a row in the fact table for each answer for every user, which i dont think is ideal, but i can live with this if necessary.
I will have to report on questions that have not been answered by users as well as what has been answered and i dont know how to address this in a star schema.
Id appreciate some suggestions on how best to approach this.
Thanks!
July 2, 2015 at 12:59 pm
How about using a "junk dimension" for the free text answers? Your answer dimension could contain the "Other" option, but if something was entered as free text you could still reference that from the fact...and defaulted when it wasn't used.
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