Chapter 11. On-Demand Population

You’ve learned initial population in Chapter 7 and regular population in Chapter 8. There is another type of population, on-demand population, that you need to familiarize yourself with. You apply on-demand population when you need to load source data outside the normal schedule, at the time the source data is available or as needed by the data warehouse. For example, sales promotion source data might be available only when a promotion is being scheduled and is not available otherwise.

The date pre-population discussed in Chapter 6, “Populating the Date Dimension” can be regarded as a type of on-demand population. You pre-populate your data warehouse with dates and when you almost run out of dates, you run the pre-population again.

On-demand population is the topic of this chapter. Here you learn how to enhance the schema and perform on-demand population for the dw database.