VeeKay (2/15/2013)
Hi,I'm running into a similar situation. Can you please provide some direction/example of the methods to create a DIMENSION from the column in the FACT table? E.g. I'm having a patient discharges FACT table which has 'Age' as a column. I want to create a dimension on this column without having to create a separate look up table for it as a dimension.
Thanks,
VK
What I did ( and I have done the patient age dimension) is I created a table with one row for each year (say 0 - ??) . Then I had a column for 5 Year age bands , 10 year age bands, and a column for invalid age (Our data had patients that were older than 150 years so I thought that these people needed to be identified as suspect )
Generally if I have a single fact table that contains multiple dimension then I create a view over the fact table to create views for single dimensions. So create a view for Customer, one for product etc all based on the fact table.
Thiow works well, and is clear to understand and maintain. I use fact dimensions only when the granularity needs to be at the lowest level and try to avoid these like the plague.
E.