How were you thinking of populating your dimension tables without creating ETL packages? Whether you need to create staging tables depends on a number of things such as:

- how frequently your ETL process runs.

- how much data is captured form your source systems.

- what sort of resource pressure the ETL process places on your source systems. (Staging tables are often used for just the EL part of ETL, i.e. get the data out of the source systems as quickly as possible therefore minimising the impact on those source systems).

- do you have Slowly Changing Dimensions and if so, which type?

Another benefit of using staging tables is that in the event of a failure in loading data into your Data Warehouse, you don't have to back and extract data from the source systems again - you just go back to the staging tables.

It's perfectly possible and normal to have dimension tables with far less than 1000 rows.

Regards

Lempster