Part I: Fundamentals

You implement a dimensional data warehouse using a relational database. Two types of relational tables, the fact table and the dimension table, make up the basic components and form the schema of a data warehouse. You will build these basic components in a MySQL database in the first part of this book.

More specifically, Part I covers the following five primary topics:

• The star schema

• Surrogate keys

• Dimension history

• Fact table measure additivity

• Dimensional queries