Chapter 1: Basic Components

Overview

There are two topics you learn in this chapter, the star schema and the surrogate key. The star schema is the database structure of a dimensional data warehouse. A surrogate key is a column you add to a data warehouse table that acts as the primary key for that table.

In this chapter you begin a long journey building a real-world data warehouse. Here are the tasks you will perform in this chapter.

• Creating a database user

• Creating a relational database for the data warehouse and another one for the source database

• Creating database tables for the data warehouse

• Generating surrogate keys.

You need to create a source database because you don’t have a source for your data warehouse yet. In the real world, this is not necessary because your data warehouse is based on an existing source. You will start using the source database in Part II of this book.