MODULE 1

Topics to be studied:
• Business Intelligence
• Business Analytics
  Business Intelligence
 Business intelligence (BI) refers to the procedural and
technical infrastructure that collects, stores, and analyzes
the data produced by a company’s activities.
 BI is a broad term that encompasses data mining, process
analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive
analytics. BI parses all the data generated by a business and
presents easy-to-digest reports, performance measures, and
trends that inform management decisions.
 Software companies produce BI solutions for companies
that wish to make better use of their data.
 BI tools and software come in a wide variety of forms such
as spreadsheets, reporting/query software, data visualization
software, data mining tools, and online analytical
processing (OLAP).
 Self-service BI is an approach to analytics that allows
individuals without a technical background to access and
explore data.
 Definitions of BI
 Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that
combines architectures, tools, databases, analytical
tools, applications, and methodologies. It is, like DSS,
a content free expression, so it means different things
to different people. Part of the confusion about BI lies
in the flurry of acronyms and buzzwords that are
associated with it (e.g ., business performance
management [BPM]). BI's major objective is to enable
interactive access (sometimes in real time) to data, to
enable manipulation of data, and to give business
managers and analysts the ability to conduct
appropriate analysis. By analyzing historical and
current data, situations, and performances, decision
makers get valuable insights that enable them to make
more informed and better decisions. The process of BI
is based on the transformation of data to information,
then to decisions, and finally to actions.
 A Brief History of BI
 The term BI was coined by the Gartner Group in the mid-1990s.
However, the concept is much older; it has its roots in the MIS
reporting systems of the 1970s. During that period, reporting systems
were static, two dimensional, and had no analytical capabilities. In the
early 1980s, the concept of executive information systems (EIS)
emerged. This concept expanded the computerized support to top-level
managers and executives. Some of the capabilities introduced were
dynamic multidimensional (ad hoc or on-demand) reporting,
forecasting and prediction, trend analysis, drill-down to details, status
access, and critical success factors. These features appeared in dozens
of commercial products until the mid-1990s. Then the same capabilities
and some new ones appeared under the name BI. Today, a good BI-
based enterprise information system contains all the information
executives need. So, the original concept of EIS was transformed into
BI. By 2005, BI systems started to include artificial intelligence
capabilities as well as powerful analytical capabilities. Figure 1.2
illustrates the various tools and techniques that may be included in a BI
system. It illustrates the evolution of BI as well. The tools shown in
Figure 1.2 provide the capabilities of BI. The most sophisticated BI
products include most of these capabilities; others specialize in only
some of them.
 Why Business need a Business Intelligence (BI) Reporting Tool
 The implementation of BI reporting, in businesses across a vast range of
industries, has positively impacted overall business performance, if used
correctly. To get an idea of the ways in which BI reporting will boost business,
here is a look at the various reasons.
 1. Workflow pace improves
 Because BI is able to access data from multiple sources, and efficiently collate
this into a usable BI reporting tool, there is no delay to analysis and decision-
making. Because of the centralised nature of BI reporting, everyone from entry-
level employees to key stakeholders are able to access the report.
 2. Simplified data
 Beyond mere data access, BI reporting makes the data easily digestible for all
employees, even those outside the IT field. Because most of us are able to
process visual data quicker than text – think of all those PowerPoint
presentations you sit through! – this form of BI reporting gets everyone on the
same page quickly.
 3. Incorporation of historical data
 In addition to the real-time data, BI reporting is also able to access vast amounts
of historical information which is then amalgamated with the new information as
a way to generate useful business information. The machine-learning algorithms
will then pick up on patterns and trends that are either hurting or helping
business.
 4. Operational forecasting
 The afore-mentioned trends, based on tracking, predictive analytics and
artificial intelligence, will assist businesses in making informed decisions
about future operations. This minimises the chance of costly business
decisions that aren’t based on solid research, while giving businesses a
competitive edge.
 5. Customer insight
 Business survival is wholly dependent on happy customers, no matter
what industry you’re in. That’s where BI reporting comes in hand, once
again. BI is able to track customer behaviour, gather relevant customer
information and allow you to personalise the customer experience for
improved brand loyalty.
 6. Improved data quality
 Obviously, the better the data quality, the more informed the business
decisions will be emanating from the data. BI software reporting
consolidates a variety of data from various sources, providing you with a
much more accurate reflection of what is happening in the business.
 7. Strategised solutions
 At the end of it all, BI reporting enables businesses to make informed
decisions and formulate crucial strategies for effective future business
practices. This include streamlining budgets, improving internal
mechanisms, and establishing campaigns that leverage business strengths
identified through data.
 Key Features of any Business Intelligence Solution
 Different organizations will invest in a Business Intelligence (BI)
solution for different reasons depending on their specific
circumstances and industry.
 Regardless of individual agenda, here are six features you should
insist upon in any BI solution, no matter the circumstances of its
application:
 1. Executive dashboards
 Personalized Dashboards deliver relevant, easily understood real-
time data to business leaders, enabling faster and better decision-
making whilst lowering response times to internal and external
events. Executives need access to personalized dashboards that
deliver easy-to-understand KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) and
summary information on a regular, scheduled basis. Additionally,
exception reporting should alert the executive to unexpected
events and scenarios that require action. Personalized data
delivery means executives are able to make decisions quickly,
without any guesswork, and without having to wade through
irrelevant information.
 2. Location Intelligence
 Location Intelligence is the ability to map and visualize data in geographical
formats. Exploring and visualizing data sets based on special elements
enables organizations to understand their business operations from new
perspectives, such as sales per region.
 3. “What if” analysis
 “What if” analysis allows businesses to assess the potential effects of critical
business decision before they’re actually made. Using existing data, users
can formulate strategies to achieve business targets and avoid the default “hit
and miss” approach. This helps management undertake accurate strategic
planning.
 4. Interactive reports
 Interactive reports help users convert data into knowledge. They allow users
to better understand the analysis within reports, and the underlying data
those reports are based on, to support better decision-making. User should be
able to:
 Drill down and through reports
 Conduct slice and dice OLAP analysis
 Apply analysis such as moving averages and regression to highlight trends in
data
 Use time-series zooming to scan large data sets to understand anomalies in
their data
 Use conditional formatting to set data alerts which highlight data exceptions
 5. Meta data layer
 A metadata layer makes reporting easy and eliminates the
need for coding and SQL( Structured Query Language),
allowing users and report writers to see and access
information in simple business language. Users solely
interact with data at the meta data level without having to
comprehend the complexities of the underlying data or
database.
 6. Ranking reports
 This feature allows you to create reports that order specific
categories of information, from across multiple dimensions,
by selecting specific criteria. Ranking reports let you view
the best and worst performing aspects of your business. For
example, you could create a report that ranks your 10 best
selling products, regions or sales people.
 Importance and Uses of Business Intelligence:
 Business Intelligence provides historical, current, and predictive
views of business decisions. This impact can be measured on
almost any business function from sales to production to finance.
Here are some ways in which business intelligence is used by
business:
 1. Customer Analysis:
 Nowadays, consumers interact with business in multiple ways.
There are websites, chatbots, emails, social media, chatbots, calls,
direct interaction and many others. This increased number of
touchpoints has resulted in data from multiple sources. Business
intelligence aims at integrating this data from multiple sources to
gain a complete overview of the customer. Low-level data
analysis only gives insights into what is happening. Which
strategies worked and which did not. Business intelligence goes a
step ahead and evaluates possible reasons of why a strategy
worked or failed. This helps in establishing cause and effect
relationship for more detailed analysis on customer behavior and
preferences.
 2. Improve operational efficiency:
 The current markets are saturated. The internet is overcrowded with
content, ideas, experts, products, services – practically everything.
Whatever we want is easily accessible to us. In this age of information
and products overload nobody needs another “me too” company
offering just another “obvious solution”. Business intelligence guides
the executives and owners to put their dollars in the right resources and
infrastructure. By understanding the market trends business
intelligence can propose new business models, techniques, processes
and methods. The insights generated can be used to improve the
operational efficiency of businesses.
 3. Driving revenue:
 Business intelligence can help define the exact strategy to drive revenue
for your business. It can provide key insights like who your end user is,
what influences their buying decisions, where to find them and how to
make your pitch. Today the marketplace is flooded with companies
pushing information in the hopes of making a sale. Business
intelligence is the knowledge of exact data about the behavior of your
ideal customer. It gives information like where they consume
information, what is going to drive them to conversions etc. With this
information, you can create marketing strategies that maximize the
revenues and improve ROI of decisions.
 4. Gaining competitive advantage:
 Basic insights like account statements, google analytics etc. are
accessible to all business entities. But these tools and techniques
only give limited information about the market, competition, and
customers. Also, a majority of traditional data analysis
techniques give insights into the data already acquired by the
companies. Business intelligence involves looking for secondary
data sources, social signals, market trends, etc. to give a
competitive edge to organizations.
 5. Spotting business problems:
 Business intelligence goes beyond the profit and loss statement
and balance sheet to give insights into the true health of an
organization. Many BI applications can integrate with your
accounting software to find out trends that would otherwise
remain hidden from the executives. Business intelligence is not
limited to tracking KPIs (key performance indicators), it includes
forecasting to avoid bottlenecks and time critical decisions like
purchasing or hiring. By showcasing data from multiple angles
BI can highlight problems that would normally be missed out in
traditional analysis techniques.
 Components of Business Intelligence

Data Warehouse

Business
Business
User Interface Analytics
Analytics
Components

Business
Performance
Management
 Data Warehouse
 A data warehouse is a type of data management system
that is designed to enable and support business
intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. Data
warehouses are solely intended to perform queries and
analysis and often contain large amounts of historical
data. The data within a data warehouse is usually
derived from a wide range of sources such as
application log files and transaction applications.
 A data warehouse centralizes and consolidates large
amounts of data from multiple sources. Its analytical
capabilities allow organizations to derive valuable
business insights from their data to improve decision-
making. Over time, it builds a historical record that can
be invaluable to data scientists and business analysts.
Because of these capabilities, a data warehouse can be
considered an organization’s “single source of truth.”
 Business Analytics
 Business analytics (BA) is a set of disciplines and
technologies for solving business problems using
data analysis, statistical models and other
quantitative methods. It involves an iterative,
methodical exploration of an organization's data,
with an emphasis on statistical analysis, to drive
decision-making.
 Data-driven companies treat their data as a business
asset and actively look for ways to turn it into a
competitive advantage. Success with business
analytics depends on data quality, skilled analysts
who understand the technologies and the business,
and a commitment to using data to gain insights
that inform business decisions.
 Business Performance Management (BPM)
 Business Performance Management (BPM),
otherwise termed as Corporate Performance
Management (CPM) or Enterprise
Performance Management, is tuned toward
optimization of overall business performance
and achievement of business goals. It enables
an organization to enhance the management of
their business performance through the aid of
reports, analytics, Key Performance Indicators,
etc. that help them measure and monitor
efficiency and success of their business
activities.
 User Interface
 User interface, commonly abbreviated as UI, describes the
way a user accesses and interacts with a system. It’s the
physical characteristics of the application, whether digital or
tangible; it’s literally the part that you interact with, the face
of the system to the user, and how they think of it. A UI
should meet the needs of the user with simplicity and
elegance.
 Flat UIs have become fundamental in creating successful user
experiences because they offer a straightforward,
minimalistic approach to design. Utilizing two-dimensional
illustrations and lessening the use of shadows, gradient
textures, and three-dimensional treatments is aesthetically
pleasing and helps users to process the content quickly
without distraction.
 Along with the user experience, UI is important for driving
broad user adoption. For example, not all users are “pivot-
table” compliant. Focus in on the target user and their needs
and capabilities, and deliver analytics in a UI that is engaging
and fits that end-user.
  Business Analytics
 Business analytics uses data to create mathematical models
to help organizations make decisions that bring value or are
in their best interest. There is much data out there for
organizations to use, though what data they choose and why
they use it will vary from industry to industry.
 Data is such an essential tool for organizations because the
data itself is objective, grounded in fact. It’s this objectivity
that can be most helpful for organizations in determining
what decisions they need to make to create the most value
for them.
 Business analytics (BA) is the combination of skills,
technologies, and practices used to examine an
organization's data and performance as a way to gain
insights and make data-driven decisions in the future using
statistical analysis. The goal of BA is to narrow down which
datasets are useful and which can increase revenue,
productivity, and efficiency.
 Overview of Analytics and its Types :
 The word analytics has replaced the previous individual
components of computerized decision support technologies that
have been available under various labels in the past. Indeed,
many practitioners and academics now use the word analytics in
place of BI.
 Although many authors and consultants have defined it slightly
differently, one can view analytics as the process of developing
actionable decisions or recommendations for actions based upon
insights generated from historical data. The Institute for
Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) has
created a major initiative to organize and promote analytics.
According to INFORMS, analytics represents the combination of
computer technology, management science techniques, and
statistics to solve real problems. Of course, many other
organizations have proposed their own interpretations and
motivations for analytics. For example, SAS Institute Inc.
proposed eight levels of analytics that begin with standardized
reports from a computer system. These reports essentially
provide a sense of what is happening with an organization
 Additional technologies have enabled us to create more
customized reports that can be generated on an ad hoc basis.
The next extension of reporting takes us to online analytical
processing (OLAP)-type queries that allow a user to dig deeper
and determine specific sources of concern or opportunities.
Technologies available today can also automatically issue alerts
for a decision maker when performance warrants such alerts. At
a consumer level we see such alerts for weather or other issues.
But similar alerts can also be generated in specific settings when
sales fall above or below a certain level within acertain time
period or when the inventory for a specific product is running
low.
 All of these applications are made possible through analysis
and queries on data being collected by an organization. The next
level of analysis might entail statistical analysis to better
understand patterns. These can then be taken a step further to
develop forecasts or models for predicting how customers might
respond to a specific marketing campaign or on going
service/product offerings. When an organization has a good
view of what is happening and what is likely to happen, it can
also employ other techniques to make the best decisions under
the circumstances. These eight levels of analytics are described
in more detail in a white paper by SAS
 This idea of looking at all the data to understand what
is happening, what will happen, and how to make the
best of it has also been encapsulated by INFORMS in
proposing three levels of analytics. These three levels
are identified (informs.org/ Community/Analytics) as
descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. Figure 1.5
presents two graphical views of these three levels of
analytics.
 One view suggests that these three are somewhat
independent steps (of a ladder) and one type of
analytics applications leads to another. The
interconnected circles view suggests that there is
actually some overlap across these three types of
analytics. In either case, the interconnected nature of
different types of analytics applications is evident. We
next introduce these three levels of analytics.
 Descriptive Analytics
 Descriptive or reporting analytics refers to knowing what is happening in
the organization and understanding some underlying trends and causes of
such occurrences. This involves, first of all, consolidation of data sources
and availability of all relevant data in a form that enables appropriate
reporting and analysis. Usually development of this data infrastructure is
part of data warehouses. From this data infrastructure we can develop
appropriate reports, queries, alerts, and trends using various reporting
tools and techniques.
 A significant technology that has become a key player in this area is
visualization. Using the latest visualization tools in the marketplace, we
can now develop powerful insights in the operations of our organization.
 Predictive Analytics
 Predictive analytics aims to determine what is likely to happen in the
future. This analysis is based on statistical techniques as well as other
more recently developed techniques that fall under the general category
of data mining. The goal of these techniques is to be able to predict if the
customer is likely to switch to a competitor what the customer would
likely buy next and how much, what promotion a customer would
respond to, whether this customer is a creditworthy risk, and so forth.
 A number of techniques are used in developing
predictive analytical applications, including
various classification algorithms. We can also
use clustering algorithms for segmenting
customers into different clusters to be able to
target specific promotions to them. Finally, we
can use association mining techniques to
estimate relationships between different
purchasing behaviours. That is, if a customer
buys one product, what else is the customer
likely to purchase? Such analysis can assist a
retailer in recommending or promoting related
products. For example, any product search on
Amazon.com results in the retailer also
suggesting other similar products that a
customer may be interested in.
 Prescriptive Analytics
 The third category of analytics is termed Prescriptive
Analytics. The goal of prescriptive analytics is to
recognise what is going on as well as the likely forecast
and make decisions to achieve the best performance
possible. The group of techniques has historically
studied under the umbrella of operations research or
management sciences and are generally aimed at
optimizing the performance of a system. The goal here is
to provide a decision or a recommendation for a specific
action. These recommendations can be in the forms of a
specific yes/no decision for a problem, a specific amount
(say, price for a specific item or airfare to charge), or a
complete set of production plans. The decisions may be
presented to a decision maker in a report or may directly
be used in an automated decision rules system (e.g ., in
airline pricing systems). Thus, these types of analytics
can also be termed decision or normative analytics..
 Importance of business analytics
 Organizations employ Business analytics so they can make data-driven
decisions. Business analytics gives business an excellent overview and insight
on how companies can become more efficient, and these insights will enable
such business optimize and automate their processes. It is no surprise that data-
driven companies, and also make use of business analytics usually outperform
their contemporaries. The reason for this is that the insights gained via business
analytics enable them to; understand why specific results are achieved, explore
more effective business processes, and even predict the likelihood of certain
results.
 Business analytics also offers adequate support and coverage for businesses
who are looking to make the right proactive decisions. Business analytics also
allows organizations to automate their entire decision-making process, so as to
deliver real-time responses when needed.
 One of the apparent importance of business analytics is the fact that it helps to
gain essential business insights. It does this by presenting the right data to work
it. This goes a long way in making decision making more efficient, but also
easy.
 Efficiency is one area of business analytics helps any organization to achieve
immediately. Since its inception, business analytics have played a key role in
helping business improve their efficiency. Business analytics collates a
considerable volume of data in a timely manner, and also in a way that it can
easily be analyzed. This allows businesses to make the right decisions faster.
 Business analytics help organizations to reduce risks. By helping them make
the right decisions based on available data such as customer preferences,
trends, and so on, it can help businesses to curtail short and long-term risk.
 Components of BA
 Business Analytics can be broken down into 3
components:

Business
Context

BA
Components

Data
Technology
Science
➢ Business Context
 BA project starts with the business context and the
ability of the organization to ask questions.
 Lets understand this with an example-
 Target's pregnancy Prediction.
 Target is one of the largest retail chains in the
world.
 Target developed a model to assign a pregnancy
score to each female customer among their
shoppers which can further be used for target
marketing.
 Now question here is:
 1) What is so special about this prediction?
 2) Why pregnant women?
 The following business knowledge manifests the importance
of pregnancy prediction from a retailer's perspective:
✓ Pregnant women are likely to be price-insensitive, so they
become the holy grail for retailers.
✓ According to some report close to 4 million children were born in
2015, i.e. the market size of baby related products was at least 38
billion USD.
✓ When target developed pregnancy prediction model the market
size was the same or similar.
✓ For many customers shopping is a habit but the shopping
behavior changes during special events such as marriage,
pregnancy, etc. and during that period it becomes easier to target
them during such special events.
 In analytics it is very important to have knowledge of business
context for the ability to ask the right questions to start the
analytics process.
 Another example of this is "Did you forget feature" by Big
basket.
➢ Technology
 To find out whether a customer is pregnant or to find out
whether a customer has forgotten to place an order online,
we need data.
 IT is used for data capture, data storage, data preparation,
data analysis and share.
 Today most data are unstructured. I.e. they are in the form
of images, texts, voice, video etc.
 To analyze data, one may need to use software such as R
python, SAS, SPSS, etc.
 Technology is also required to deploy the solution.
 In the case of Target, technology can be used to personalize
coupons that can be sent to individual customers.
 An important output of analytics is automation of
actionable items derived from analytical models;
automation of actionable items is usually achieved using
IT.
➢ Data Science
 Data Science is the most important component
of analytics, it consists of statistical and
operations research techniques, machine
learning and deep algorithms.
 The objective of data science component of
analytics is to identify the most appropriate
statistical model.
 Here identification of the technique that is best
based on measure of accuracy is most
important.
 Several models are developed for solving the
problem using different techniques and few
models may be chosen for deployment of the
solution.
 Transaction Processing Vs. Analytic
Processing
 Online Transaction Processing
 OLTP systems refer to a class of systems that
manage transaction oriented applications.
 These applications are only concerned with
entry, storage, and retrieval of data.
 They are designed to cover most of day-to-day
operations of an organization such as
purchasing, inventory, payroll, accounting, etc.
 OLTP systems are characterized by large
number of short online transactions. Such as
insert, update, and delete.
 Examples include:
 An online banking customer might send money
from his account to his wife’s account. In this case,
the transaction only involves two accounts – his
account and his wife’s. It does not involve the other
bank customers.
 Point of sale system in Supermarket.
 You pick up a bar of chocolate and await your chance
in the queue for getting it billed. The cashier scan the
barcode.
 Consequent to the scanning of the barcode, some
activities take place in the background- database is
assessed, the price and the product information is
retrieved and displayed on the computer screen.
 Cashier feeds in the quantity purchased the
application then computes the total, generates the
bill, you pay and leave.
 POS of supermarket is an OLTP system.
 The queries that OLTP can not answer.
 In the POS system we were able perform
transactions and do simple query processing.
 How about the questions which are complex
in nature such as:
 Supermarket store deciding on introducing
new product. Which product to introduce?
 Supermarket store is looking at offering
some discount on their year end sale. How
much discount to offer? Should different
discounts be given to different customers?
etc.
 All the queries stated have more to do
with analysis than simple reporting.
 Advantages of OLTP system
 Simplicity- It is designed typically for use by
clerks, cashiers, clients, etc.
 Efficiency-It allows its users to read, write, and
delete data quickly
 Fast query processing- It responds to user
action immediately and also supports
transaction processing on demand.
 Challenges of an OLTP system
 Security- An OLTP system requires
concurrency control and recovery mechanisms
 OLTP system data content not suitable for
decision making
 Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
 OLAP differs from traditional databases in the
way data is conceptualized and stored.
 In OLAP data is held in the dimensional form
rather than relational form.
 OLAP's life blood is multi-dimensional data.
The multi-dimensional data model views data
in form of a cube.
 let's understand this by taking the example of
"ALL GOODS" store.
 The data captured by OLTP system is under
the column headings: Sections, product
category Name, year quarter, and sales amount.
 One Dimensional Data
 Looking data from one perspective. Say,
looking at sales amount section wise
 We may choose to look at data from different
perspective such as product category wise,
by year quarter.
 Two Dimensional Data
 If you are suppose to view data by calendar
quarters and product categories, then two
dimensional data comes into play.
 Two-dimensional depiction of data allows one the
liberty to think about dimensions as a kind of
coordinate system.
 Three Dimensional Data
 What if the company's analyst wishes to view data-all of it-
along all three dimensions and all on the same table at the
same time?
 For such kind of data analyst needs a three dimensional
view of data. From where if he wants to look into the
highest sales then he can.
 Queries than an OLAP system can process
 Taking example of ALL GOODS three dimensional
view of data an OLAP system is capable of
responding to:
 What will be the future trend for Accessories in the
kids section?
 Given the customer buying pattern, will be profitable
to launch product XYZ in kids section?
 What impact will a 5% increase in the price of
products have on customers?
 Advantages of OLAP
 Multidimensional data presentation
 Consistency of information
 What if analysis
 Single platform for all information and business
needs.
Online Transaction processing Online analytic processing
systems (OLTP) are constantly (OLAP) systems are involved in
involved in handling updates extracting information from data
(add/edit/delete) to what we might stored by OLTP systems
call operational databases • Routine sales reports by
• ATM withdrawal product, by region, by
transaction, sales order sales person, by …
entry via an ecommerce • Often built on top of a data
site – updates DBs warehouse where the data
• OLTP – handles routine is not transactional
on-going business • Main goal is the
• ERP, SCM, CRM systems effectiveness (and then,
generate and store data in efficiency) – provide
OLTP systems correct information in a
• The main goal is to have timely manner
high efficiency
 Models For OLTP & OLAP:
 Entity Relationship Model for OLTP
 Star Schema for OLAP
 Snowflake Schema for OLTP
 Entity Relationship(ER) Model for OLTP
 This model is used to define the data
elements and relationship for a specified
system.
 Here, the database schema is represented by
a set of entities and the relationship between
them.
 For the above Example we have:
 Employee (EmployeeID is the primary key)
 EmployeeAddress (EmployeeID is a
foreign key referencing to the EmployeeID
attribute of Employee entity)
 EmployeePayHistory(EmployeeID is a
foreign key referencing to the employeeID
attribute of Employee entity)
 There is 1:M cardinality between
Employee and Employee Address entities.
 I.e. an instance of Employee entity can be
related with multiple instances of
EmployeeAddress entity.
 There is also 1:M cardinality between
Employee and Employee PayHistory entity.
 I.e. an instance of Employee entity can be
related with multiple instances of
EmployeePayHistory entity.
 1:M Cardinality means One-to-Many
 Models for OLAP
 A multidimensional model exist in the form of a star
schema, a snowflake schema or Galaxy schema.
 Lets understand Star and Snowflake Model in detail.
 Star Schema
 It is the simplest of data warehousing schema.
 It consist of a large central table called the fact table.
 The central table is referred by a number of dimension
tables.
 The schema graph looks like stardust. The dimension
tables form a radial pattern around the large central fact
table.
 The star schema is always very effective for handling
queries.
 Star Schema for "ElectronicsForAll“
 Central Fact table for "Sales"
 Four dimensions- Time, product, Employee,
and customers.
 The "sales" central fact table has keys to
each of the four dimensions along with
Total, Quantity and Discount.
 Each table further has a set of attributes.
 For Example: the product dimension table
has these attributes-ProductID,
ProductName, ProductCategory, and
Unitprice.
 Snowflake Schema
 The Snowflake Schema is a variant of the star
schema.
 Here the centralized fact table is connected to
multiple dimensions. In this, dimensions are
present in a normalized form in multiple related
tables.
 A Snowflake structure materializes when the
dimension of a star schema are detailed and
highly structured, having several levels of
relationship, and the child tables have multiple
parent tables.
 This "Snowflaking" effect affects only the
dimension tables and does not affect the fact
table.
 Here in the example of "ElectronicsForAll"
there is no change in the central fact table. The
difference lies in the definition of dimension
tables.
 The single dimension table for "Employee" in
star schema is normalized in the snowflake
schema, resulting in new "Department" table."
 The employee dimension table now contains
the attributes- EmployeeID, EmployeeName,
Title, DepartmentID, Region, Territory.
 The "DepartmentID" attribute links the
"Employee" dimension table with the
"Department" dimension table.
 The "Department" dimension table has details
about each department, such as "Name" and
"Location" of each department.
 Identifying Dimensions to be Snowflaked
 The dimension table is to be snowflaked if
the low-cardinality attributes of the
dimensions have been divided into separate
normalized table.
 These tables are then joined to the original
dimension table with referential constraints.
 Generally, snowflaking is not recommended
in the dimension table, as it hampers the
understandability and performance of the
dimensional model as more tables would be
required to be joined to satisfy the queries.
When to Snowflake?
 The dimensional model is snowflaked under
following two conditions:
 The dimension table consists of two or more set of
attributes which define information at different
grains.
 The set of attributes of the same dimension table
are being populated by different source systems.
 When NOT to Snowflake?
 One should avoid snowflaking or normalization of
dimension table, unless required or appropriate.
 Do not snowflake hierarchies of one dimension
table into separate tables.
 Hierarchies should belong to the dimension table
only and should not be snowflaked