General OLAP question

[Niklas]

Hi all,

I'm new in OLAP. I've already learned a lot about star schemes and snowflake
schemes. Taht works all fine, if you have a 1:1(0) relation between a record
in the fact table and the dimension table. But how to deal with 1:n
relationships?

Example: Inventory list of computers

The fact table would contain a nodeid and references e.g. to a operating
system dimension table, BIOS dimension table, etc. But a computer can have
several netcards, several cpus, etc.. Certainly, I know how to deal with this
in a relational (OLTP) model, but how to handle that within OLAP?

Thanks

[Deepak Puri]

Depending on what questions need to be answered, one approach to
"order-line-item" type of data is to create 2 cubes and combine them in
a virtual cube. The first cube fact table could be at the computer
level, the second at the component level. The second cube would share
all parent dimensions of the first cube, but have additional dimensions
like "component type".

- Deepak

Deepak Puri
Microsoft MVP - SQL Server

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