Dot Net Interview Questions answers

What is the difference between Router and Routing?

Router: -
Router is a device which is used to connect different network. A device or setup that finds the best route between any two networks, even if there are several networks to traverse. Like bridges, remote sites can be connected using routers over dedicated or switched lines to create WANs.
Routing: -
Process of delivering a message across one or more networks via the most appropriate path.

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Category : Exchange Server

What is Multimaster replication?

In addition to storing primary zone information in Dns we can also store it in active directory as active directory object.This integrates Dns with active directory in order to take advantage of active directory features
The benefits are :

1) zone can be modified from any domain controller within the domain and this information is automatically updated or replicated to all the other domain controllers along with the active directory replication.This replication is said to be multimaster replication.

2) We no longer face the standard dns server drawbacks.
In standard dns server only the primary server can modify the zone and then replicate the changes to other domain controllers(It was in windows NT4 before).
But when Dns gets integrated with AD .Zone can be modified and replicated from any domain controller.

3) Fault tolerance
4) Security

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Category : Exchange Server

What is the ntds.tit file default size?

40 MB

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Category : Exchange Server

What is the concept for authoritative and nonauthoritative restoration?

Non-authoriative restore: which accept the entries from other domain controller after the restoed data.
Authoritative: Not accept the entries from other domain controller.

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Category : Exchange Server

What is Rsop ?

Resultant set of policy is provided to make policy modification and trouble shooting easier. Rsop is the query object it has two mode

1.logging mode: Polls existing policies and the reports the result of the query.

2.Planning mode: The questions ask about the planned policy and the report the result of the query.

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Category : Exchange Server

In which domain functional level, we can rename domain name?

All domain controllers must be running Windows Server 2003, and the Active Directory functional level must be at the Windows Server 2003. Yes u can rename the domain in windows server 2003

Archive for '.NET'

ASP.NET Interview Questions

Describe the role of inetinfo.exe, aspnet_isapi.dll andaspnet_wp.exe in the page loading process.
inetinfo.exe is theMicrosoft IIS server running, handling ASP.NET requests among other things.When an ASP.NET request is received (usually a file with .aspx extension),the ISAPI filter aspnet_isapi.dll takes care of it by passing the request tothe actual worker process aspnet_wp.exe.
What’s the difference between Response.Write() andResponse.Output.Write()?
The [...]

Posted: January 9th, 2008 under .NET.
Tags: ASP, ASP dot net, ASP Questions, DotNet Questions
Comments: 8
C# Scope

scope in C#
Simply, the scope of a type (a variable, a method, or a class) is where you can use that type in your program. In other words, the scope defines the area of the program where that type can be accessible and referenced.
When you declare a variable inside a block of code (like a [...]

Posted: December 10th, 2007 under .NET.
Tags: C Hash scope, C Scopre, C++ and C, Questions
Comments: 2
C# .NET

1) Can we have private constructor? when can I use them?
2) what is an internal specifier? what happens internally when I use access specifier Internal ?
3) DO we have inline function in C#? otherwise what is equivalent inline function in C#?
1. Explain the differences between Server-side and Client-side code?
ANS: Server side code will execute [...]

Posted: December 10th, 2007 under .NET.
Tags: C Hash, C++ and C, dot net, Interview, Questions
Comments: 2
ASP.NET interview questions

Following are some ASP.NET interview questions.

Posted: July 21st, 2007 under .NET.
Comments: 4
Basic .NET and ASP.NET interview questions

Following are some Basic .NET and ASP.NET interview questions, answer them if you can or just read and get answers.

ASP.NET Interview Questions free

# Describe the role of inetinfo.exe, aspnet_isapi.dll andaspnet_wp.exe in the page loading process.
inetinfo.exe is theMicrosoft IIS server running, handling ASP.NET requests among other things.When an ASP.NET request is received (usually a file with .aspx extension),the ISAPI filter aspnet_isapi.dll takes care of it by passing the request tothe actual worker process aspnet_wp.exe.
What’s the difference between Response.Write() andResponse.Output.Write()?
# The later one allows you to write formattedoutput.
# What methods are fired during the page load?
# Init() - when the pageis instantiated
# Load() - when the page is loaded into server memory
# PreRender() - the brief moment before the page is displayed to the user asHTML,
Unload() - when page finishes loading.
# Where does the Web page belong in the .NET Framework class hierarchy?
System.Web.UI.Page
# Where do you store the information about the user’s locale?
System.Web.UI.Page.Culture
# What’s the difference between Codebehind=”MyCode.aspx.cs” andSrc=”MyCode.aspx.cs”?
CodeBehind is relevant to Visual Studio.NET only.
# What’s a bubbled event?

# When you have a complex control, like DataGrid, writing an event processing
# What’s the difference between Response.Write() andResponse.Output.Write()?
Response.Output.Write() allows you to write formatted output.

# What methods are fired during the page load?
Init() - when the page is instantiated
Load() - when the page is loaded into server memory
PreRender() - the brief moment before the page is displayed to the user as HTML
Unload() - when page finishes loading.

# When during the page processing cycle is ViewState available?
After the Init() and before the Page_Load(), or OnLoad() for a control.

# What namespace does the Web page belong in the .NET Framework class hierarchy?
System.Web.UI.Page

# Where do you store the information about the user’s locale?
System.Web.UI.Page.Culture

# What’s the difference between Codebehind=”MyCode.aspx.cs” andSrc=”MyCode.aspx.cs”?
CodeBehind is relevant to Visual Studio.NET only.

# What’s a bubbled event?
When you have a complex control, like DataGrid, writing an event processing routine for each object (cell, button, row, etc.) is quite tedious. The controls can bubble up their eventhandlers, allowing the main DataGrid event handler to take care of its constituents.

# Suppose you want a certain ASP.NET function executed on MouseOver for a certain button. Where do you add an event handler?
Add an OnMouseOver attribute to the button. Example: btnSubmit.Attributes.Add(”onmouseover”,”someClientCodeHere();”);

# What data types do the RangeValidator control support?
Integer, String, and Date.

# Explain the differences between Server-side and Client-side code?
Server-side code executes on the server. Client-side code executes in the client’s browser.

# What type of code (server or client) is found in a Code-Behind class?
The answer is server-side code since code-behind is executed on the server. However, during the code-behind’s execution on the server, it can render client-side code such as JavaScript to be processed in the clients browser. But just to be clear, code-behind executes on the server, thus making it server-side code.

# Should user input data validation occur server-side or client-side? Why?
All user input data validation should occur on the server at a minimum. Additionally, client-side validation can be performed where deemed appropriate and feasable to provide a richer, more responsive experience for the user.

# What is the difference between Server.Transfer and Response.Redirect? Why would I choose one over the other?
Server.Transfer transfers page processing from one page directly to the next page without making a round-trip back to the client’s browser. This provides a faster response with a little less overhead on the server. Server.Transfer does not update the clients url history list or current url. Response.Redirect is used to redirect the user’s browser to another page or site. This performas a trip back to the client where the client’s browser is redirected to the new page. The user’s browser history list is updated to reflect the new address.

# Can you explain the difference between an ADO.NET Dataset and an ADO Recordset?
Valid answers are:
· A DataSet can represent an entire relational database in memory, complete with tables, relations, and views.
· A DataSet is designed to work without any continuing connection to the original data source.
· Data in a DataSet is bulk-loaded, rather than being loaded on demand.
· There’s no concept of cursor types in a DataSet.
· DataSets have no current record pointer You can use For Each loops to move through the data.
· You can store many edits in a DataSet, and write them to the original data source in a single operation.
· Though the DataSet is universal, other objects in ADO.NET come in different versions for different data sources.

# What is the Global.asax used for?
The Global.asax (including the Global.asax.cs file) is used to implement application and session level events.

# What are the Application_Start and Session_Start subroutines used for?
This is where you can set the specific variables for the Application and Session objects.

# Can you explain what inheritance is and an example of when you might use it?
When you want to inherit (use the functionality of) another class. Example: With a base class named Employee, a Manager class could be derived from the Employee base class.

# Describe the difference between inline and code behind.
Inline code written along side the html in a page. Code-behind is code written in a separate file and referenced by the .aspx page.

# Explain what a diffgram is, and a good use for one?
The DiffGram is one of the two XML formats that you can use to render DataSet object contents to XML. A good use is reading database data to an XML file to be sent to a Web Service.

# Whats MSIL, and why should my developers need an appreciation of it if at all?
MSIL is the Microsoft Intermediate Language. All .NET compatible languages will get converted to MSIL. MSIL also allows the .NET Framework to JIT compile the assembly on the installed computer.

# Which method do you invoke on the DataAdapter control to load your generated dataset with data?
The Fill() method.

# Can you edit data in the Repeater control?
No, it just reads the information from its data source.

# Which template must you provide, in order to display data in a Repeater control?
ItemTemplate.

# How can you provide an alternating color scheme in a Repeater control?
Use the AlternatingItemTemplate.

# What property must you set, and what method must you call in your code, in order to bind the data from a data source to the Repeater control?
You must set the DataSource property and call the DataBind method.

# What base class do all Web Forms inherit from?
The Page class.

# Name two properties common in every validation control?
ControlToValidate property and Text property.

# Which property on a Combo Box do you set with a column name, prior to setting the DataSource, to display data in the combo box?
DataTextField property.

# Which control would you use if you needed to make sure the values in two different controls matched?
CompareValidator control.

# How many classes can a single .NET DLL contain?
It can contain many classes.

dotnet interviews

33. ASP.NET Authentication Providers and IIS Security

ASP.NET implements authentication using authentication providers, which are code modules that verify credentials and implement other security functionality such as cookie generation. ASP.NET supports the following three authentication providers:
Forms Authentication: Using this provider causes unauthenticated requests to be redirected to a specified HTML form using client side redirection. The user can then supply logon credentials, and post the form back to the server. If the application authenticates the request (using application-specific logic), ASP.NET issues a cookie that contains the credentials or a key for reacquiring the client identity. Subsequent requests are issued with the cookie in the request headers, which means that subsequent authentications are unnecessary.
Passport Authentication: This is a centralized authentication service provided by Microsoft that offers a single logon facility and membership services for participating sites. ASP.NET, in conjunction with the Microsoft® Passport software development kit (SDK), provides similar functionality as Forms Authentication to Passport users.
Windows Authentication: This provider utilizes the authentication capabilities of IIS. After IIS completes its authentication, ASP.NET uses the authenticated identity's token to authorize access.
To enable a specified authentication provider for an ASP.NET application, you must create an entry in the application's configuration file as follows:
// web.config file

34. What is the difference between ASP and ASP.NET?

ASP is interpreted. ASP.NET Compiled event base programming.
Control events for text button can be handled at client javascript only. Since we have server controls events can handle at server side.
More error handling.
ASP .NET has better language support, a large set of new controls and XML based components, and better user authentication.
ASP .NET provides increased performance by running compiled code.
ASP .NET code is not fully backward compatible with ASP.
ASP .NET also contains a new set of object oriented input controls, like programmable list boxes, validation controls.
A new data grid control supports sorting, data paging, and everything you expect from a dataset control. The first request for an ASP.NET page on the server will compile the ASP .NET code and keep a cached copy in memory. The result of this is greatly increased performance.
ASP .NET is not fully compatible with earlier versions of ASP, so most of the old ASP code will need some changes to run under ASP .NET. To overcome this problem, ASP .NET uses a new file extension ".aspx". This will make ASP .NET applications able to run side by side with standard ASP applications on the same server.

datawarehousing see free

In the preceding chapters, you've been unwittingly immersed in the world of on-line transaction processing (OLTP). This world carries with it some assumptions:

1. Only store a piece of information once. If there are N copies of something in the database and you need to change it, you might forget to change it in all N places. Note that only storing information in one spot also enables updates to be fast.
2. It is okay if queries are complex because they are authored infrequently and by professional programmers.
3. Never sequentially scan large tables; reread the tuning chapter if Oracle takes more than one second to perform any operation.

These are wonderful rules to live by if one is booking orders, adding user comments to pages, recording a clickthrough, or seeing if someone is authorized to download a file.

You can probably continue to live by these rules if you want some answers from your data. Write down a list of questions that are important and build some report pages. You might need materialized views to make these reports fast and your queries might be complex, but you don't need to leave the OLTP world simply because business dictates that you answer a bunch of questions.

Why would anyone leave the OLTP world? Data warehousing is useful when you don't know what questions to ask.
What it means to facilitate exploration
Reenactment of Powell's trip. Lava Falls. Grand Canyon National Park. August 1999. Data exploration is only useful when non-techies are able to explore. That means people with very weak skills will be either authoring queries or specifying queries with menus. You can't ask a marketing executive to look at a 600-table data model and pick and choose the relevant columns. You can't ask a salesman to pull the answer to "is this a repeat customer or not?" out of a combination of the customers and orders tables.

If a data exploration environment is to be useful it must fulfill the following criteria:

* complex questions can be asked with a simple SQL query
* different questions imply very similar SQL query structure
* very different questions require very similar processing time to answer
* exploration can be done from any computer anywhere

The goal is that a business expert can sit down at a Web browser, use a sequence of forms to specify a query, and get a result back in an amount of time that seems reasonable.

It will be impossible to achieve this with our standard OLTP data models. Answering a particular question may require JOINing in four or five extra tables, which could result in a 10,000-fold increase in processing time. Even if a novice user could be guided to specifying a 7-way JOIN from among 600 tables, that person would have no way of understanding or predicting query processing time. Finally there is the question of whether you want novices querying your OLTP tables. If they are only typing SELECTs they might not be doing too much long-term harm but the short-term processing load might result in a system that feels crippled.

It is time to study data warehousing.
Classical Retail Data Warehousing

"Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. ... [The businessman] is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight. This we should be tolerant of--every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse. ... A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express his precise meaning."
-- last chapter of The Elements of Style, Strunk and White

Let's imagine a conversation between the Chief Information Officer of WalMart and a sales guy from Sybase. We've picked these companies for concreteness but they stand for "big Management Information System (MIS) user" and "big relational database management system (RDBMS) vendor".

Walmart: "I want to keep track of sales in all of my stores simultaneously."
Sybase: "You need our wonderful RDBMS software. You can stuff data in as sales are rung up at cash registers and simultaneously query data out right here in your office. That's the beauty of concurrency control."

So Walmart buys a $1 million Sun E10000 multi-CPU server and a $500,000 Sybase license. They buy Database Design for Smarties and build themselves a normalized SQL data model:

create table product_categories (
product_category_id integer primary key,
product_category_name varchar(100) not null
);

create table manufacturers (
manufacturer_id integer primary key,
manufacturer_name varchar(100) not null
);

create table products (
product_id integer primary key,
product_name varchar(100) not null,
product_category_id references product_categories,
manufacturer_id references manufacturers
);

create table cities (
city_id integer primary key,
city_name varchar(100) not null,
state varchar(100) not null,
population integer not null
);

create table stores (
store_id integer primary key,
city_id references cities,
store_location varchar(200) not null,
phone_number varchar(20)
);

create table sales (
product_id not null references products,
store_id not null references stores,
quantity_sold integer not null,
-- the Oracle "date" type is precise to the second
-- unlike the ANSI date datatype
date_time_of_sale date not null
);

-- put some data in

insert into product_categories values (1, 'toothpaste');
insert into product_categories values (2, 'soda');

insert into manufacturers values (68, 'Colgate');
insert into manufacturers values (5, 'Coca Cola');

insert into products values (567, 'Colgate Gel Pump 6.4 oz.', 1, 68);
insert into products values (219, 'Diet Coke 12 oz. can', 2, 5);

insert into cities values (34, 'San Francisco', 'California', 700000);
insert into cities values (58, 'East Fishkill', 'New York', 30000);

insert into stores values (16, 34, '510 Main Street', '415-555-1212');
insert into stores values (17, 58, '13 Maple Avenue', '914-555-1212');

insert into sales values (567, 17, 1, to_date('1997-10-22 09:35:14', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS'));
insert into sales values (219, 16, 4, to_date('1997-10-22 09:35:14', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS'));
insert into sales values (219, 17, 1, to_date('1997-10-22 09:35:17', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS'));

-- keep track of which dates are holidays
-- the presence of a date (all dates will be truncated to midnight)
-- in this table indicates that it is a holiday
create table holiday_map (
holiday_date date primary key
);

-- where the prices are kept
create table product_prices (
product_id not null references products,
from_date date not null,
price number not null
);

insert into product_prices values (567,'1997-01-01',2.75);
insert into product_prices values (219,'1997-01-01',0.40);

What do we have now?

SALES table product id store id quantity sold date/time of sale
567 17 1 1997-10-22 09:35:14
219 16 4 1997-10-22 09:35:14
219 17 1 1997-10-22 09:35:17
...


PRODUCTS table product id product name product category manufacturer id
567 Colgate Gel Pump 6.4 oz. 1 68
219 Diet Coke 12 oz. can 2 5
...


PRODUCT_CATEGORIES table product category id product category name
1 toothpaste
2 soda
...


MANUFACTURERS table manufacturer id manufacturer name
68 Colgate
5 Coca Cola
...


STORES table store id city id store location phone number
16 34 510 Main Street 415-555-1212
17 58 13 Maple Avenue 914-555-1212
...


CITIES table city id city name state population
34 San Francisco California 700,000
58 East Fishkill New York 30,000
...


After a few months of stuffing data into these tables, a WalMart executive, call her Jennifer Amolucre asks "I noticed that there was a Colgate promotion recently, directed at people who live in small towns. How much Colgate toothpaste did we sell in those towns yesterday? And how much on the same day a month ago?"

At this point, reflect that because the data model is normalized, this information can't be obtained from scanning one table. A normalized data model is one in which all the information in a row depends only on the primary key. For example, the city population is not contained in the stores table. That information is stored once per city in the cities table and only city_id is kept in the stores table. This ensures efficiency for transaction processing. If Walmart has to update a city's population, only one record on disk need be touched. As computers get faster, what is more interesting is the consistency of this approach. With the city population kept only in one place, there is no risk that updates will be applied to some records and not to others. If there are multiple stores in the same city, the population will be pulled out of the same slot for all the stores all the time.

Ms. Amolucre's query will look something like this...


select sum(sales.quantity_sold)
from sales, products, product_categories, manufacturers, stores, cities
where manufacturer_name = 'Colgate'
and product_category_name = 'toothpaste'
and cities.population < 40000
and trunc(sales.date_time_of_sale) = trunc(sysdate-1) -- restrict to yesterday
and sales.product_id = products.product_id
and sales.store_id = stores.store_id
and products.product_category_id = product_categories.product_category_id
and products.manufacturer_id = manufacturers.manufacturer_id
and stores.city_id = cities.city_id;

This query would be tough for a novice to read and, being a 6-way JOIN of some fairly large tables, might take quite a while to execute. Moreover, these tables are being updated as Ms. Amolucre's query is executed.

Soon after the establishment of Jennifer Amolucre's quest for marketing information, store employees notice that there are times during the day when it is impossible to ring up customers. Any attempt to update the database results in the computer freezing up for 20 minutes. Eventually the database administrators realize that the system collapses every time Ms. Amolucre's toothpaste query gets run. They complain to Sybase tech support.

Walmart: "We type in the toothpaste query and our system wedges."
Sybase: "Of course it does! You built an on-line transaction processing (OLTP) system. You can't feed it a decision support system (DSS) query and expect things to work!"
Walmart: "But I thought the whole point of SQL and your RDBMS was that users could query and insert simultaneously."
Sybase: "Uh, not exactly. If you're reading from the database, nobody can write to the database. If you're writing to the database, nobody can read from the database. So if you've got a query that takes 20 minutes to run and don't specify special locking instructions, nobody can update those tables for 20 minutes."
Walmart: "That sounds like a bug."
Sybase: "Actually it is a feature. We call it pessimistic locking."
Walmart: "Can you fix your system so that it doesn't lock up?"
Sybase: "No. But we made this great loader tool so that you can copy everything from your OLTP system into a separate DSS system at 100 GB/hour."

Since you are reading this book, you are probably using Oracle, which is one of the few database management systems that achieves consistency among concurrent users via versioning rather than locking (the other notable example is the free open-source PostgreSQL RDBMS). However, even if you are using Oracle, where readers never wait for writers and writers never wait for readers, you still might not want the transaction processing operation to slow down in the event of a marketing person entering an expensive query.

Basically what IT vendors want Walmart to do is set up another RDBMS installation on a separate computer. Walmart needs to buy another $1 million of computer hardware. They need to buy another RDBMS license. They also need to hire programmers to make sure that the OLTP data is copied out nightly and stuffed into the DSS system--data extraction. Walmart is now building the data warehouse.
Insight 1
A data warehouse is a separate RDBMS installation that contains copies of data from on-line systems. A physically separate data warehouse is not absolutely necessary if you have a lot of extra computing horsepower. With a DBMS that uses optimistic locking you might even be able to get away with keeping only one copy of your data.
As long as we're copying...
As long as you're copying data from the OLTP system into the DSS system ("data warehouse"), you might as well think about organizing and indexing it for faster retrieval. Extra indices on production tables are bad because they slow down inserts and updates. Every time you add or modify a row to a table, the RDBMS has to update the indices to keep them consistent. But in a data warehouse, the data are static. You build indices once and they take up space and sometimes make queries faster and that's it.

If you know that Jennifer Amolucre is going to do the toothpaste query every day, you can denormalize the data model for her. If you add a town_population column to the stores table and copy in data from the cities table, for example, you sacrifice some cleanliness of data model but now Ms. Amolucre's query only requires a 5-way JOIN. If you add manufacturer and product_category columns to the sales table, you don't need to JOIN in the products table.
Where does denormalization end?
Once you give up the notion that the data model in the data warehouse need bear some resemblance to the data model in the OLTP system, you begin to think about reorganizing the data model further. Remember that we're trying to make sure that new questions can be asked by people with limited SQL experience, i.e., many different questions can be answered with morphologically similar SQL. Ideally the task of constructing SQL queries can be simplified enough to be doable from a menu system. Also, we are trying to delivery predictable response time. A minor change in a question should not result in a thousand-fold increase in system response time.

The irreducible problem with the OLTP data model is that it is tough for novices to construct queries. Given that computer systems are not infinitely fast, a practical problem is inevitably that the response times of a query into the OLTP tables will vary in a way that is unpredictable to the novice.

Suppose, for example, that Bill Novice wants to look at sales on holidays versus non-holidays with the OLTP model. Bill will need to go look at the data model, which on a production system will contain hundreds of tables, to find out if any of them contain information on whether or not a date is a holiday. Then he will need to use it in a query, something that isn't obvious given the peculiar nature of the Oracle date data type:

select sum(sales.quantity_sold)
from sales, holiday_map
where trunc(sales.date_time_of_sale) = trunc(holiday_map.holiday_date)

That one was pretty simple because JOINing to the holiday_map table knocks out sales on days that aren't holidays. To compare to sales on non-holidays, he will need to come up with a different query strategy, one that knocks out sales on days that are holidays. Here is one way:

select sum(sales.quantity_sold)
from sales
where trunc(sales.date_time_of_sale)
not in
(select holiday_date from holiday_map)

Note that the morphology (structure) of this query is completely different from the one asking for sales on holidays.

Suppose now that Bill is interested in unit sales just at those stores where the unit sales tended to be high overall. First Bill has to experiment to find a way to ask the database for the big-selling stores. Probably this will involve grouping the sales table by the store_id column:

select store_id
from sales
group by store_id
having sum(quantity_sold) > 1000

Now we know how to find stores that have sold more than 1000 units total, so we can add this as a subquery:

select sum(quantity_sold)
from sales
where store_id in
(select store_id
from sales
group by store_id
having sum(quantity_sold) > 1000)

Morphologically this doesn't look very different from the preceding non-holiday query. Bill has had to figure out how to use the GROUP BY and HAVING constructs but otherwise it is a single table query with a subquery. Think about the time to execute, however. The sales table may contain millions of rows. The holiday_map table probably only contains 50 or 100 rows, depending on how long the OLTP system has been in place. The most obvious way to execute these subqueries will be to perform the subquery for each row examined by the main query. In the case of the "big stores" query, the subquery requires scanning and sorting the entire sales table. So the time to execute this query might be 10,000 times longer than the time to execute the "non-holiday sales" query. Should Bill Novice expect this behavior? Should he have to think about it? Should the OLTP system grind to a halt because he didn't think about it hard enough?

Virtually all the organizations that start by trying to increase similarity and predictability among decision support queries end up with a dimensional data warehouse. This necessitates a new data model that shares little with the OLTP data model.
Dimensional Data Modeling: First Steps
Dimensional data modeling starts with a fact table. This is where we record what happened, e.g., someone bought a Diet Coke in East Fishkill. What you want in the fact table are facts about the sale, ideally ones that are numeric, continuously valued, and additive. The last two properties are important because typical fact tables grow to a billion rows or more. People will be much happier looking at sums or averages than detail. An important decision to make is the granularity of the fact table. If Walmart doesn't care about whether or not a Diet Coke was sold at 10:31 AM or 10:33 AM, recording each sale individually in the fact table is too granular. CPU time, disk bandwidth, and disk space will be needlessly consumed. Let's aggregate all the sales of any particular product in one store on a per-day basis. So we will only have one row in the fact table recording that 200 cans of Diet Coke were sold in East Fishkill on November 30, even if those 200 cans were sold at 113 different times to 113 different customers.

create table sales_fact (
sales_date date not null,
product_id integer,
store_id integer,
unit_sales integer,
dollar_sales number
);

So far so good, we can pull together this table with a query JOINing the sales, products, and product_prices (to fill the dollar_sales column) tables. This JOIN will group by product_id, store_id, and the truncated date_time_of_sale. Constructing this query will require a professional programmer but keep in mind that this work only need be done once. The marketing experts who will be using the data warehouse will be querying from the sales_fact table.

In building just this one table, we've already made life easier for marketing. Suppose they want total dollar sales by product. In the OLTP data model this would have required tangling with the product_prices table and its different prices for the same product on different days. With the sales fact table, the query is simple:

select product_id, sum(dollar_sales)
from sales_fact
group by product_id

We have a fact table. In a dimensional data warehouse there will always be just one of these. All of the other tables will define the dimensions. Each dimension contains extra information about the facts, usually in a human-readable text string that can go directly into a report. For example, let us define the time dimension:

create table time_dimension (
time_key integer primary key,
-- just to make it a little easier to work with; this is
-- midnight (TRUNC) of the date in question
oracle_date date not null,
day_of_week varchar(9) not null, -- 'Monday', 'Tuesday'...
day_number_in_month integer not null, -- 1 to 31
day_number_overall integer not null, -- days from the epoch (first day is 1)
week_number_in_year integer not null, -- 1 to 52
week_number_overall integer not null, -- weeks start on Sunday
month integer not null, -- 1 to 12
month_number_overall integer not null,
quarter integer not null, -- 1 to 4
fiscal_period varchar(10),
holiday_flag char(1) default 'f' check (holiday_flag in ('t', 'f')),
weekday_flag char(1) default 'f' check (weekday_flag in ('t', 'f')),
season varchar(50),
event varchar(50)
);

Why is it useful to define a time dimension? If we keep the date of the sales fact as an Oracle date column, it is still just about as painless as ever to ask for holiday versus non-holiday sales. We need to know about the existence of the holiday_map table and how to use it. Suppose we redefine the fact table as follows:

create table sales_fact (
time_key integer not null references time_dimension,
product_id integer,
store_id integer,
unit_sales integer,
dollar_sales number
);

Instead of storing an Oracle date in the fact table, we're keeping an integer key pointing to an entry in the time dimension. The time dimension stores, for each day, the following information:

* whether or not the day was a holiday
* into which fiscal period this day fell
* whether or not the day was part of the "Christmas season" or not

If we want a report of sales by season, the query is straightforward:

select td.season, sum(f.dollar_sales)
from sales_fact f, time_dimension td
where f.time_key = td.time_key
group by td.season

If we want to get a report of sales by fiscal quarter or sales by day of week, the SQL is structurally identical to the above. If we want to get a report of sales by manufacturer, however, we realize that we need another dimension: product. Instead of storing the product_id that references the OLTP products table, much better to use a synthetic product key that references a product dimension where data from the OLTP products, product_categories, and manufacturers tables are aggregated.

Since we are Walmart, a multi-store chain, we will want a stores dimension. This table will aggregate information from the stores and cities tables in the OLTP system. Here is how we would define the stores dimension in an Oracle table:

create table stores_dimension (
stores_key integer primary key,
name varchar(100),
city varchar(100),
county varchar(100),
state varchar(100),
zip_code varchar(100),
date_opened date,
date_remodeled date,
-- 'small', 'medium', 'large', or 'super'
store_size varchar(100),
...
);

This new dimension gives us the opportunity to compare sales for large versus small stores, for new and old ones, and for stores in different regions. We can aggregate sales by geographical region, starting at the state level and drilling down to county, city, or ZIP code. Here is how we'd query for sales by city:

select sd.city, sum(f.dollar_sales)
from sales_fact f, stores_dimension sd
where f.stores_key = sd.stores_key
group by sd.city

Dimensions can be combined. To report sales by city on a quarter-by-quarter basis, we would use the following query:

select sd.city, td.fiscal_period, sum(f.dollar_sales)
from sales_fact f, stores_dimension sd, time_dimension td
where f.stores_key = sd.stores_key
and f.time_key = td.time_key
group by sd.stores_key, td.fiscal_period

(extra SQL compared to previous query shown in bold).

The final dimension in a generic Walmart-style data warehouse is promotion. The marketing folks will want to know how much a price reduction boosted sales, how much of that boost was permanent, and to what extent the promoted product cannibalized sales from other products sold at the same store. Columns in the promotion dimension table would include a promotion type (coupon or sale price), full information on advertising (type of ad, name of publication, type of publication), full information on in-store display, the cost of the promotion, etc.

At this point it is worth stepping back from the details to notice that the data warehouse contains less information than the OLTP system but it can be more useful in practice because queries are easier to construct and faster to execute. Most of the art of designing a good data warehouse is in defining the dimensions. Which aspects of the day-to-day business may be condensed and treated in blocks? Which aspects of the business are interesting?
Real World Example: A Data Warehouse for Levis Strauss
In 1998, ArsDigita Corporation built a Web service as a front end to an experimental custom clothing factory operated by Levi Strauss. Users would visit our site to choose a style of khaki pants, enter their waist, inseam, height, weight, and shoe size, and finally check out with their credit card. Our server would attempt to authorize a charge on the credit card through CyberCash. The factory IT system would poll our server's Oracle database periodically so that it could start cutting pants within 10 minutes of a successfully authorized order.

The whole purpose of the factory and Web service was to test and analyze consumer reaction to this method of buying clothing. Therefore, a data warehouse was built into the project almost from the start.

We did not buy any additional hardware or software to support the data warehouse. The public Web site was supported by a mid-range Hewlett-Packard Unix server that had ample leftover capacity to run the data warehouse. We created a new "dw" Oracle user, GRANTed SELECT on the OLTP tables to the "dw" user, and wrote procedures to copy all the data from the OLTP system into a star schema of tables owned by the "dw" user. For queries, we added an IP address to the machine and ran a Web server program bound to that second IP address.

Here is how we explained our engineering decisions to our customer (Levi Strauss):

We employ a standard star join schema for the following reasons:

* Many relational database management systems, including Oracle 8.1,
are heavily optimized to execute queries against these schemata.

* This kind of schema has been proven to scale to the world's
largest data warehouses.

* If we hired a data warehousing nerd off the street, he or she
would have no trouble understanding our schema.

In a star join schema, there is one fact table ("we sold a pair of
khakis at 1:23 pm to Joe Smith") that references a bunch of dimension
tables. As a general rule, if we're going to narrow our interest
based on a column, it should be in the dimension table. I.e., if
we're only looking at sales of grey dressy fabric khakis, we should
expect to accomplish that with WHERE clauses on columns of a product
dimension table. By contrast, if we're going to be aggregating
information with a SUM or AVG command, these data should be stored in
the columns of the fact table. For example, the dollar amount of the
sale should be stored within the fact table. Since we have so few
prices (essentially only one), you might think that this should go in
a dimension. However, by keeping it in the fact table we're more
consistent with traditional data warehouses.

After some discussions with Levi's executives, we designed in the following dimension tables:

* time
for queries comparing sales by season, quarter, or holiday
* product
for queries comparing sales by color or style
* ship to
for queries comparing sales by region or state
* promotion
for queries aimed at determining the relationship between discounts and sales
* consumer
for queries comparing sales by first-time and repeat buyers
* user experience
for queries looking at returned versus exchanged versus accepted items (most useful when combined with other dimensions, e.g., was a particular color more likely to lead to an exchange request)

These dimensions allow us to answer questions such as

* In what regions of the country are pleated pants most popular? (fact table joined with the product and ship-to dimensions)
* What percentage of pants were bought with coupons and how has that varied from quarter to quarter? (fact table joined with the promotion and time dimensions)
* How many pants were sold on holidays versus non-holidays? (fact table joined with the time dimension)

The Dimension Tables
The time_dimension table is identical to the example given above.

create table time_dimension (
time_key integer primary key,
-- just to make it a little easier to work with; this is
-- midnight (TRUNC) of the date in question
oracle_date date not null,
day_of_week varchar(9) not null, -- 'Monday', 'Tuesday'...
day_number_in_month integer not null, -- 1 to 31
day_number_overall integer not null, -- days from the epoch (first day is 1)
week_number_in_year integer not null, -- 1 to 52
week_number_overall integer not null, -- weeks start on Sunday
month integer not null, -- 1 to 12
month_number_overall integer not null,
quarter integer not null, -- 1 to 4
fiscal_period varchar(10),
holiday_flag char(1) default 'f' check (holiday_flag in ('t', 'f')),
weekday_flag char(1) default 'f' check (weekday_flag in ('t', 'f')),
season varchar(50),
event varchar(50)
);

We populated the time_dimension table with a single INSERT statement. The core work is done by Oracle date formatting functions. A helper table, integers, is used to supply a series of numbers to add to a starting date (we picked July 1, 1998, a few days before our first real order).

-- Uses the integers table to drive the insertion, which just contains
-- a set of integers, from 0 to n.
-- The 'epoch' is hardcoded here as July 1, 1998.

-- d below is the Oracle date of the day we're inserting.
insert into time_dimension
(time_key, oracle_date, day_of_week, day_number_in_month,
day_number_overall, week_number_in_year, week_number_overall,
month, month_number_overall, quarter, weekday_flag)
select n, d, rtrim(to_char(d, 'Day')), to_char(d, 'DD'), n + 1,
to_char(d, 'WW'),
trunc((n + 3) / 7), -- July 1, 1998 was a Wednesday, so +3 to get the week numbers to line up with the week
to_char(d, 'MM'), trunc(months_between(d, '1998-07-01') + 1),
to_char(d, 'Q'), decode(to_char(d, 'D'), '1', 'f', '7', 'f', 't')
from (select n, to_date('1998-07-01', 'YYYY-MM-DD') + n as d
from integers);

Remember the Oracle date minutia that you learned in the chapter on dates. If you add a number to an Oracle date, you get another Oracle date. So adding 3 to "1998-07-01" will yield "1998-07-04".

There are several fields left to be populated that we cannot derive using Oracle date functions: season, fiscal period, holiday flag, season, event. Fiscal period depended on Levi's choice of fiscal year. The event column was set aside for arbitrary blocks of time that were particularly interesting to the Levi's marketing team, e.g., a sale period. In practice, it was not used.

To update the holiday_flag field, we used two helper tables, one for "fixed" holidays (those which occur on the same day each year), and one for "floating" holidays (those which move around).

create table fixed_holidays (
month integer not null check (month >= 1 and month <= 12),
day integer not null check (day >= 1 and day <= 31),
name varchar(100) not null,
primary key (month, day)
);

-- Specifies holidays that fall on the Nth DAY_OF_WEEK in MONTH.
-- Negative means count backwards from the end.
create table floating_holidays (
month integer not null check (month >= 1 and month <= 12),
day_of_week varchar(9) not null,
nth integer not null,
name varchar(100) not null,
primary key (month, day_of_week, nth)
);

Some example holidays:

insert into fixed_holidays (name, month, day)
values ('New Year''s Day', 1, 1);
insert into fixed_holidays (name, month, day)
values ('Christmas', 12, 25);
insert into fixed_holidays (name, month, day)
values ('Veteran''s Day', 11, 11);
insert into fixed_holidays (name, month, day)
values ('Independence Day', 7, 4);

insert into floating_holidays (month, day_of_week, nth, name)
values (1, 'Monday', 3, 'Martin Luther King Day');
insert into floating_holidays (month, day_of_week, nth, name)
values (10, 'Monday', 2, 'Columbus Day');
insert into floating_holidays (month, day_of_week, nth, name)
values (11, 'Thursday', 4, 'Thanksgiving');
insert into floating_holidays (month, day_of_week, nth, name)
values (2, 'Monday', 3, 'President''s Day');
insert into floating_holidays (month, day_of_week, nth, name)
values (9, 'Monday', 1, 'Labor Day');
insert into floating_holidays (month, day_of_week, nth, name)
values (5, 'Monday', -1, 'Memorial Day');

An extremely clever person who'd recently read SQL for Smarties would probably be able to come up with an SQL statement to update the holiday_flag in the time_dimension rows. However, there is no need to work your brain that hard. Recall that Oracle includes two procedural languages, Java and PL/SQL. You can implement the following pseudocode in the procedural language of your choice:

foreach row in "select name, month, day from fixed_holidays"
update time_dimension
set holiday_flag = 't'
where month = row.month and day_number_in_month = row.day;
end foreach

foreach row in "select month, day_of_week, nth, name from floating_holidays"
if row.nth > 0 then
# If nth is positive, put together a date range constraint
# to pick out the right week.
ending_day_of_month := row.nth * 7
starting_day_of_month := ending_day_of_month - 6

update time_dimension
set holiday_flag = 't'
where month = row.month
and day_of_week = row.day_of_week
and starting_day_of_month <= day_number_in_month
and day_number_in_month <= ending_day_of_month;
else
# If it is negative, get all the available dates
# and get the nth one from the end.
i := 0;
foreach row2 in "select day_number_in_month from time_dimension
where month = row.month
and day_of_week = row.day_of_week
order by day_number_in_month desc"
i := i - 1;
if i = row.nth then
update time_dimension
set holiday_flag = 't'
where month = row.month
and day_number_in_month = row2.day_number_in_month
break;
end if
end foreach
end if
end foreach

The product dimension
The product dimension contains one row for each unique combination of color, style, cuffs, pleats, etc.

create table product_dimension (
product_key integer primary key,
-- right now this will always be "ikhakis"
product_type varchar(20) not null,
-- could be "men", "women", "kids", "unisex adults"
expected_consumers varchar(20),
color varchar(20),
-- "dressy" or "casual"
fabric varchar(20),
-- "cuffed" or "hemmed" for pants
-- null for stuff where it doesn't matter
cuff_state varchar(20),
-- "pleated" or "plain front" for pants
pleat_state varchar(20)
);

To populate this dimension, we created a one-column table for each field in the dimension table and use a multi-table join without a WHERE clause. This generates the cartesian product of all the possible values for each field:

create table t1 (expected_consumers varchar(20));
create table t2 (color varchar(20));
create table t3 (fabric varchar(20));
create table t4 (cuff_state varchar(20));
create table t5 (pleat_state varchar(20));

insert into t1 values ('men');
insert into t1 values ('women');
insert into t1 values ('kids');
insert into t1 values ('unisex');
insert into t1 values ('adults');
[etc.]

insert into product_dimension
(product_key, product_type, expected_consumers,
color, fabric, cuff_state, pleat_state)
select
product_key_sequence.nextval,
'ikhakis',
t1.expected_consumers,
t2.color,
t3.fabric,
t4.cuff_state,
t5.pleat_state
from t1,t2,t3,t4,t5;

Notice that an Oracle sequence, product_key_sequence, is used to generate unique integer keys for each row as it is inserted into the dimension.
The promotion dimension
The art of building the promotion dimension is dividing the world of coupons into a broad categories, e.g., "between 10 and 20 dollars". This categorization depended on the learning that the marketing executives did not care about the difference between a $3.50 and a $3.75 coupon.

create table promotion_dimension (
promotion_key integer primary key,
-- can be "coupon" or "no coupon"
coupon_state varchar(20),
-- a text string such as "under $10"
coupon_range varchar(20)
);

The separate coupon_state and coupon_range columns allow for reporting of sales figures broken down into fullprice/discounted or into a bunch of rows, one for each range of coupon size.
The consumer dimension
We did not have access to a lot of demographic data about our customers. We did not have a lot of history since this was a new service. Consequently, our consumer dimension is extremely simple. It is used to record whether or not a sale in the fact table was to a new or a repeat customer.

create table consumer_dimension (
consumer_key integer primary key,
-- 'new customer' or 'repeat customer'
repeat_class varchar(20)
);

The user experience dimension
If we are interested in building a report of the average amount of time spent contemplating a purchase versus whether the purchase was ultimately kept, the user_experience_dimension table will help.

create table user_experience_dimension (
user_experience_key integer primary key,
-- 'shipped on time', 'shipped late'
on_time_status varchar(20),
-- 'kept', 'returned for exchange', 'returned for refund'
returned_status varchar(30)
);

The ship-to dimension
Classically one of the most powerful dimensions in a data warehouse, our ship_to_dimension table allows us to group sales by region or state.

create table ship_to_dimension (
ship_to_key integer primary key,
-- e.g., Northeast
ship_to_region varchar(30) not null,
ship_to_state char(2) not null
);

create table state_regions (
state char(2) not null primary key,
region varchar(50) not null
);

-- to populate:
insert into ship_to_dimension
(ship_to_key, ship_to_region, ship_to_state)
select ship_to_key_sequence.nextval, region, state
from state_regions;

Notice that we've thrown out an awful lot of detail here. Had this been a full-scale product for Levi Strauss, they would probably have wanted at least extra columns for county, city, and zip code. These columns would allow a regional sales manager to look at sales within a state.

(In a data warehouse for a manufacturing wholesaler, the ship-to dimension would contain columns for the customer's company name, the division of the customer's company that received the items, the sales district of the salesperson who sold the order, etc.)
The Fact Table
The granularity of our fact table is one order. This is finer-grained than the canonical Walmart-style data warehouse as presented above, where a fact is the quantity of a particular SKU sold in one store on one day (i.e., all orders in one day for the same item are aggregated). We decided that we could afford this because the conventional wisdom in the data warehousing business in 1998 was that up to billion-row fact tables were manageable. Our retail price was $40 and it was tough to foresee a time when the factory could make more than 1,000 pants per day. So it did not seem extravagant to budget one row per order.

Given the experimental nature of this project we did not delude ourselves into thinking that we would get it right the first time. Since we were recording one row per order we were able to cheat by including pointers from the data warehouse back into the OLTP database: order_id and consumer_id. We never had to use these but it was nice to know that if we couldn't get a needed answer for the marketing executives the price would have been some custom SQL coding rather than rebuilding the entire data warehouse.

create table sales_fact (
-- keys over to the OLTP production database
order_id integer primary key,
consumer_id integer not null,
time_key not null references time_dimension,
product_key not null references product_dimension,
promotion_key not null references promotion_dimension,
consumer_key not null references consumer_dimension,
user_experience_key not null references user_experience_dimension,
ship_to_key not null references ship_to_dimension,
-- time stuff
minutes_login_to_order number,
days_first_invite_to_order number,
days_order_to_shipment number,
-- this will be NULL normally (unless order was returned)
days_shipment_to_intent number,
pants_id integer,
price_charged number,
tax_charged number,
shipping_charged number
);

After defining the fact table, we populated it with a single insert statement:

-- find_product, find_promotion, find_consumer, and find_user_experience
-- are PL/SQL procedures that return the appropriate key from the dimension
-- tables for a given set of parameters

insert into sales_fact
select o.order_id, o.consumer_id, td.time_key,
find_product(o.color, o.casual_p, o.cuff_p, o.pleat_p),
find_promotion(o.coupon_id),
find_consumer(o.pants_id),
find_user_experience(o.order_state, o.confirmed_date, o.shipped_date),
std.ship_to_key,
minutes_login_to_order(o.order_id, usom.user_session_id),
decode(sign(o.confirmed_date - gt.issue_date), -1, null, round(o.confirmed_date - gt.issue_date, 6)),
round(o.shipped_date - o.confirmed_date, 6),
round(o.intent_date - o.shipped_date, 6),
o.pants_id, o.price_charged, o.tax_charged, o.shipping_charged
from khaki.reportable_orders o, ship_to_dimension std,
khaki.user_session_order_map usom, time_dimension td,
khaki.addresses a, khaki.golden_tickets gt
where o.shipping = a.address_id
and std.ship_to_state = a.usps_abbrev
and o.order_id = usom.order_id(+)
and trunc(o.confirmed_date) = td.oracle_date
and o.consumer_id = gt.consumer_id;

As noted in the comment at top, most of the work here is done by PL/SQL procedures such as find_product that dig up the right row in a dimension table for this particular order.

The preceding insert will load an empty data warehouse from the on-line transaction processing system's tables. Keeping the data warehouse up to date with what is happening in OLTP land requires a similar INSERT with an extra restriction WHERE clause limiting orders to only those order ID is larger than the maximum of the order IDs currently in the warehouse. This is a safe transaction to execute as many times per day as necessary--even two simultaneous INSERTs would not corrupt the data warehouse with duplicate rows because of the primary key constraint on order_id. A daily update is traditional in the data warehousing world so we scheduled one every 24 hours using the Oracle dbms_job package (http://www.oradoc.com/ora816/server.816/a76956/jobq.htm#750).
Sample Queries
We have (1) defined a star schema, (2) populated the dimension tables, (3) loaded the fact table, and (4) arranged for periodic updating of the fact table. Now we can proceed to the interesting part of our data warehouse: getting information back out.

Using only the sales_fact table, we can ask for

* the total number of orders, total revenue to date, tax paid, shipping costs to date, the average price paid for each item sold, and the average number of days to ship:

select count(*) as n_orders,
round(sum(price_charged)) as total_revenue,
round(sum(tax_charged)) as total_tax,
round(sum(shipping_charged)) as total_shipping,
round(avg(price_charged),2) as avg_price,
round(avg(days_order_to_shipment),2) as avg_days_to_ship
from sales_fact;

* the average number of minutes from login to order (we exclude user sessions longer than 30 minutes to avoid skewing the results from people who interrupted their shopping session to go out to lunch or sleep for a few hours):

select round(avg(minutes_login_to_order), 2)
from sales_fact
where minutes_login_to_order < 30

* the average number of days from first being invited to the site by email to the first order (excluding periods longer than 2 weeks to remove outliers):

select round(avg(days_first_invite_to_order), 2)
from sales_fact
where days_first_invite_to_order < 14

Joining against the ship_to_dimension table lets us ask how many pants were shipped to each region of the United States:

select ship_to_region, count(*) as n_pants
from sales_fact f, ship_to_dimension s
where f.ship_to_key = s.ship_to_key
group by ship_to_region
order by n_pants desc

Region Pants Sold
New England Region 612
NY and NJ Region 321
Mid Atlantic Region 318
Western Region 288
Southeast Region 282
Southern Region 193
Great Lakes Region 177
Northwestern Region 159
Central Region 134
North Central Region 121

Note: these data are based on a random subset of orders from the Levi's site and we have also made manual changes to the report values. The numbers are here to give you an idea of what these queries do, not to provide insight into the Levi's custom clothing business.

Joining against the time_dimension, we can ask how many pants were sold for each day of the week:

select day_of_week, count(*) as n_pants
from sales_fact f, time_dimension t
where f.time_key = t.time_key
group by day_of_week
order by n_pants desc

Day of Week Pants Sold
Thursday 3428
Wednesday 2823
Tuesday 2780
Monday 2571
Friday 2499
Saturday 1165
Sunday 814

We were able to make pants with either a "dressy" or "casual" fabric. Joining against the product_dimension table can tell us how popular each option was as a function of color:

select color, count(*) as n_pants, sum(decode(fabric,'dressy',1,0)) as n_dressy
from sales_fact f, product_dimension p
where f.product_key = p.product_key
group by color
order by n_pants desc

Color Pants Sold % Dressy
dark tan 486 100
light tan 305 49
dark grey 243 100
black 225 97
navy blue 218 61
medium tan 209 0
olive green 179 63

Note: 100% and 0% indicate that those colors were available only in one fabric.

Here is a good case of how the data warehouse may lead to a practical result. If these were the real numbers from the Levi's warehouse, what would pop out at the manufacturing guys is that 97% of the black pants sold were in one fabric style. It might not make sense to keep an inventory of casual black fabric if there is so little consumer demand for it.
Query Generation: The Commercial Closed-Source Route
The promise of a data warehouse is not fulfilled if all users must learn SQL syntax and how to run SQL*PLUS. From being exposed to 10 years of advertising for query tools, we decided that the state of forms-based query tools must be truly advanced. We thus suggested to Levi Strauss that they use Seagate Crystal Reports and Crystal Info to analyze their data. These packaged tools, however, ended up not fitting very well with what Levi's wanted to accomplish. First, constructing queries was not semantically simpler than coding SQL. The Crystal Reports consultant that we brought in said that most of his clients ended up having a programmer set up the report queries and the business people would simply run the report every day against new data. If professional programmers had to construct queries, it seemed just as easy just to write more admin pages using our standard Web development tools, which required about 15 minutes per page. Second, it was impossible to ensure availability of data warehouse queries to authorized users anywhere on the Internet. Finally there were security and social issues associated with allowing a SQL*Net connection from a Windows machine running Crystal Reports out through the Levi's firewall to our Oracle data warehouse on the Web.

Not knowing if any other commercial product would work better and not wanting to disappoint our customer, we extended the ArsDigita Community System with a data warehouse query module that runs as a Web-only tool. This is a free open-source system and comes with the standard ACS package that you can download from http://www.arsdigita.com/download/.
Query Generation: The Open-Source ACS Route
The "dw" module in the ArsDigita Community System is designed with the following goals:

1. naive users can build simple queries by themselves
2. professional programmers can step in to help out the naive users
3. a user with no skill can re-execute a saved query

We keep one row per query in the queries table:

create table queries (
query_id integer primary key,
query_name varchar(100) not null,
query_owner not null references users,
definition_time date not null,
-- if this is non-null, we just forget about all the query_columns
-- stuff; the user has hand-edited the SQL
query_sql varchar(4000)
);

Unless the query_sql column is populated with a hand-edited query, the query will be built up by looking at several rows in the query_columns table:

-- this specifies the columns we we will be using in a query and
-- what to do with each one, e.g., "select_and_group_by" or
-- "select_and_aggregate"

-- "restrict_by" is tricky; value1 contains the restriction value, e.g., '40'
-- or 'MA' and value2 contains the SQL comparion operator, e.g., "=" or ">"

create table query_columns (
query_id not null references queries,
column_name varchar(30),
pretty_name varchar(50),
what_to_do varchar(30),
-- meaning depends on value of what_to_do
value1 varchar(4000),
value2 varchar(4000)
);

create index query_columns_idx on query_columns(query_id);

The query_columns definition appears strange at first. It specifies the name of a column but not a table. This module is predicated on the simplifying assumption that we have one enormous view, ad_hoc_query_view, that contains all the dimension tables' columns alongside the fact table's columns.

Here is how we create the view for the Levi's data warehouse:

create or replace view ad_hoc_query_view
as
select minutes_login_to_order, days_first_invite_to_order,
days_order_to_shipment, days_shipment_to_intent, pants_id,
price_charged, tax_charged, shipping_charged,
oracle_date, day_of_week,
day_number_in_month, week_number_in_year, week_number_overall,
month, month_number_overall, quarter, fiscal_period,
holiday_flag, weekday_flag, season, color, fabric, cuff_state,
pleat_state, coupon_state, coupon_range, repeat_class,
on_time_status, returned_status, ship_to_region, ship_to_state
from sales_fact f, time_dimension t, product_dimension p,
promotion_dimension pr, consumer_dimension c,
user_experience_dimension u, ship_to_dimension s
where f.time_key = t.time_key
and f.product_key = p.product_key
and f.promotion_key = pr.promotion_key
and f.consumer_key = c.consumer_key
and f.user_experience_key = u.user_experience_key
and f.ship_to_key = s.ship_to_key;

At first glance, this looks like a passport to sluggish Oracle performance. We'll be doing a seven-way JOIN for every data warehouse query, regardless of whether we need information from some of the dimension tables or not.

We can test this assumption as follows:

-- tell SQL*Plus to turn on query tracing
set autotrace on

-- let's look at how many pants of each color
-- were sold in each region

SELECT ship_to_region, color, count(pants_id)
FROM ad_hoc_query_view
GROUP BY ship_to_region, color;

Oracle will return the query results first...

ship_to_region color count(pants_id)
Central Region black 46
Central Region dark grey 23
Central Region dark tan 39
..
Western Region medium tan 223
Western Region navy blue 245
Western Region olive green 212

... and then explain how those results were obtained:

Execution Plan
----------------------------------------------------------
0 SELECT STATEMENT Optimizer=CHOOSE (Cost=181 Card=15 Bytes=2430)
1 0 SORT (GROUP BY) (Cost=181 Card=15 Bytes=2430)
2 1 NESTED LOOPS (Cost=12 Card=2894 Bytes=468828)
3 2 HASH JOIN (Cost=12 Card=885 Bytes=131865)
4 3 TABLE ACCESS (FULL) OF 'PRODUCT_DIMENSION' (Cost=1 Card=336 Bytes=8400)
5 3 HASH JOIN (Cost=6 Card=885 Bytes=109740)
6 5 TABLE ACCESS (FULL) OF 'SHIP_TO_DIMENSION' (Cost=1 Card=55 Bytes=1485)
7 5 NESTED LOOPS (Cost=3 Card=885 Bytes=85845)
8 7 NESTED LOOPS (Cost=3 Card=1079 Bytes=90636)
9 8 NESTED LOOPS (Cost=3 Card=1316 Bytes=93436)
10 9 TABLE ACCESS (FULL) OF 'SALES_FACT' (Cost=3 Card=1605 Bytes=93090)
11 9 INDEX (UNIQUE SCAN) OF 'SYS_C0016416' (UNIQUE)
12 8 INDEX (UNIQUE SCAN) OF 'SYS_C0016394' (UNIQUE)
13 7 INDEX (UNIQUE SCAN) OF 'SYS_C0016450' (UNIQUE)
14 2 INDEX (UNIQUE SCAN) OF 'SYS_C0016447' (UNIQUE)

As you can see from the table names in bold face, Oracle was smart enough to examine only tables relevant to our query: product_dimension, because we asked about color; ship_to_dimension, because we asked about region; sales_fact, because we asked for a count of pants sold. Bottom line: Oracle did a 3-way JOIN instead of the 7-way JOIN specified by the view.

To generate a SQL query into ad_hoc_query_view from the information stored in query_columns is most easily done with a function in a procedural language such as Java, PL/SQL, Perl, or Tcl (here is pseudocode):

proc generate_sql_for_query(a_query_id)
select_list_items list;
group_by_items list;
order_clauses list;

foreach row in "select column_name, pretty_name
from query_columns
where query_id = a_query_id
and what_to_do = 'select_and_group_by'"]
if row.pretty_name is null then
append_to_list(group_by_items, row.column_name)
else
append_to_list(group_by_items, row.column_name || ' as "' || row.pretty_name || '"'
end if
end foreach

foreach row in "select column_name, pretty_name, value1
from query_columns
where query_id = a_query_id
and what_to_do = 'select_and_aggregate'"
if row.pretty_name is null then
append_to_list(select_list_items, row.value1 || row.column_name)
else
append_to_list(select_list_items, row.value1 || row.column_name || ' as "' || row.pretty_name || '"'
end if
end foreach

foreach row in "select column_name, value1, value2
from query_columns
where query_id = a_query_id
and what_to_do = 'restrict_by'"
append_to_list(where_clauses, row.column_name || ' ' || row.value2 || ' ' || row.value1)
end foreach

foreach row in "select column_name
from query_columns
where query_id = a_query_id
and what_to_do = 'order_by'"]
append_to_list(order_clauses, row.column_name)
end foreach

sql := "SELECT " || join(select_list_items, ', ') ||
" FROM ad_hoc_query_view"

if list_length(where_clauses) > 0 then
append(sql, ' WHERE ' || join(where_clauses, ' AND '))
end if

if list_length(group_by_items) > 0 then
append(sql, ' GROUP BY ' || join(group_by_items, ', '))
end if

if list_length(order_clauses) > 0 then
append(sql, ' ORDER BY ' || join(order_clauses, ', '))
end if

return sql
end proc

How well does this work in practice? Suppose that we were going to run regional advertisements. Should the models be pictured where pleated or plain front pants? We need to look at recent sales by region. With the ACS query tool, a user can use HTML forms to specify the following:

* pants_id : select and aggregate using count
* ship_to_region : select and group by
* pleat_state : select and group by

The preceding pseudocode turns that into

SELECT ship_to_region, pleat_state, count(pants_id)
FROM ad_hoc_query_view
GROUP BY ship_to_region, pleat_state

which is going to report sales going back to the dawn of time. If we weren't clever enough to anticipate the need for time windowing in our forms-based interface, the "hand edit the SQL" option will save us. A professional programmer can be grabbed for a few minutes to add

SELECT ship_to_region, pleat_state, count(pants_id)
FROM ad_hoc_query_view
WHERE oracle_date > sysdate - 45
GROUP BY ship_to_region, pleat_state

Now we're limiting results to the last 45 days:

ship_to_region pleat_state count(pants_id)
Central Region plain front 8
Central Region pleated 26
Great Lakes Region plain front 14
Great Lakes Region pleated 63
Mid Atlantic Region plain front 56
Mid Atlantic Region pleated 162
NY and NJ Region plain front 62
NY and NJ Region pleated 159
New England Region plain front 173
New England Region pleated 339
North Central Region plain front 7
North Central Region pleated 14
Northwestern Region plain front 20
Northwestern Region pleated 39
Southeast Region plain front 51
Southeast Region pleated 131
Southern Region plain front 13
Southern Region pleated 80
Western Region plain front 68
Western Region pleated 120

If we strain our eyes and brains a bit, we can see that plain front pants are very unpopular in the Great Lakes and South but more popular in New England and the West. It would be nicer to see percentages within region, but standard SQL does not make it possible to combine results to values in surrounding rows. We will need to refer to the "SQL for Analysis" chapter in the Oracle data warehousing documents to read up on extensions to SQL that makes this possible:

SELECT
ship_to_region,
pleat_state,
count(pants_id),
ratio_to_report(count(pants_id))
over (partition by ship_to_region) as percent_in_region
FROM ad_hoc_query_view
WHERE oracle_date > sysdate - 45
GROUP BY ship_to_region, pleat_state

We're asked Oracle to window the results ("partition by ship_to_region") and compare the number of pants in each row to the sum across all the rows within a regional group. Here's the result:

ship_to_region pleat_state count(pants_id) percent_in_region
...
Great Lakes Region plain front 14 .181818182
Great Lakes Region pleated 63 .818181818
...
New England Region plain front 173 .337890625
New England Region pleated 339 .662109375
...

This isn't quite what we want. The "percents" are fractions of 1 and reported with far too much precision. We tried inserting the Oracle built-in round function in various places of this SQL statement but all we got for our troubles was "ERROR at line 5: ORA-30484: missing window specification for this function". We had to add an extra layer of SELECT, a view-on-the-fly, to get the report that we wanted:

select ship_to_region, pleat_state, n_pants, round(percent_in_region*100)
from
(SELECT
ship_to_region,
pleat_state,
count(pants_id) as n_pants,
ratio_to_report(count(pants_id))
over (partition by ship_to_region) as percent_in_region
FROM ad_hoc_query_view
WHERE oracle_date > sysdate - 45
GROUP BY ship_to_region, pleat_state)

returns

ship_to_region pleat_state count(pants_id) percent_in_region
...
Great Lakes Region plain front 14 18
Great Lakes Region pleated 63 82
...
New England Region plain front 173 34
New England Region pleated 339 66
...

What if you're in charge of the project?
If you are in charge of a data warehousing project, you need to assemble the necessary tools. Do not be daunted by this prospect. The entire Levi Strauss system described above was implemented in three days by two programmers.

The first tool that you need is intelligence and thought. If you pick the right dimensions and put the required data into them, your data warehouse will be useful. If you don't get your dimensions right, you won't even be able to ask the interesting questions. If you're not smart or thoughtful, probably the best thing to do is find a boutique consulting firm with expertise in building data warehouses for your industry. Get them to lay out the initial star schema. They won't get it right but it should be close enough to live with for a few months. If you can't find an expert, The Data Warehouse Toolkit (Ralph Kimball 1996) contains example schemata for 10 different kinds of businesses.

You will need some place to store your data and query parts back out. Since you are using SQL your only choice is a relational database management system. There are specialty vendors that have historically made RDBMSes with enhanced features for data warehousing, such as the ability to compute a value based on information from the current row compared to information from a previously output row of the report. This gets away from the strict unordered set-theoretic way of looking at the world that E.F. Codd sketched in 1970 but has proven to be useful. Starting with version 8.1.6, Oracle has added most of the useful third-party features into their standard product. Thus all but the very smallest and very largest modern data warehouses tend to be built using Oracle (see the "SQL for Analysis" chapter in the Oracle8i Data Warehousing Guide volume of the Oracle documentation).

Oracle contains two features that may enable you to construct and use your data warehouse without investing in separate hardware. First is the optimistic locking system that Oracle has employed since the late 1980s. If someone is doing a complex query it will not affect transactions that need to update the same tables. Essentially each query runs in its own snapshot of the database as it existed when the query was started. The second Oracle feature is materialized views or summaries. It is possible to instruct the database to keep a summary of sales by quarter, for example. If someone asks for a query involving quarterly sales, the small summary table will be consulted instead of the comprehensive sales table. This could be 100 to 1000 times faster.

One typical goal of a data warehousing project is to provide a unified view of a company's disparate information systems. The only way to do this is to extract data from all of these information systems and clean up those data for consistency and accuracy. This is purportedly a challenging task when RDBMSes from different vendors are involved, though it might not seem so on the surface. After all, every RDBMS comes with a C library. You could write a C program to perform queries on the Brand X database and do inserts on the Brand Y database. Perl and Tcl have convenient facilities for transforming text strings and there are db connectivity interfaces from these scripting languages to DBMS C libraries. So you could write a Perl script. Most databases within a firm are accessible via the Web, at least within a company's internal network. Oracle includes a Java virtual machine and Java libraries to fetch Web pages and parse XML. So you could write a Java or PL/SQL program running inside your data warehouse Oracle installation to grab the foreign information and bring it back (see the chapter on foreign and legacy data).

If you don't like to program or have a particularly knotty connectivity problem involving an old mainframe, various companies make software that can help. For high-end mainframe stuff, Oracle Corporation itself offers some useful layered products. For low-end "more-convenient-than-Perl" stuff, Data Junction (www.datajunction.com) is useful.

Given an already-built data warehouse, there are a variety of useful query tools. The theory is that if you've organized your data model well enough, a non-technical user will be able to navigate around via a graphic user interface or a Web browser. The best known query tool is Crystal Reports (www.seagatesoftware.com), which we tried to use in the Levi Strauss example. See http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/dw for details on the free open-source ArsDigita Community System data warehouse query module.

Is there a bottom line to all of this? If you can think sufficiently clearly about your organization and its business to construct the correct dimensions and program SQL reasonably well, you will be successful with the raw RDBMS alone. Extra software tools can potentially make the project a bit less painful or a bit shorter but they won't be of critical importance.
More Information
The construction of data warehouses is a guild-like activity. Most of the expert knowledge is contained within firms that specialize not in data warehousing but in data warehousing for a particular kind of company. For example, there are firms that do nothing but build data warehouses for supermarkets. There are firms that do nothing but build data warehouses for department stores. Part of what keeps this a tight guild is the poor quality of textbooks and journal articles on the subject. Most of the books on data warehousing are written by and for people who do not know SQL. The books focus on (1) stuff that you can buy from a vendor, (2) stuff that you can do from a graphical user interface after the data warehouse is complete, and (3) how to navigate around a large organization to get all the other suits to agree to give you their data, their money, and a luxurious schedule.

The only worthwhile introductory book that we've found on data warehousing in general is Ralph Kimball's The Data Warehouse Toolkit. Kimball is also the author of an inspiring book on clickstream data warehousing: The Data Webhouse Toolkit. The latter book is good if you are interested in applying classical dimensional data warehousing techniques to user activity analysis.

It isn't exactly a book and it isn't great for beginners but the Oracle8i Data Warehousing Guide volume of the official Oracle server documentation is extremely useful.

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

This Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence site aims to help people get a good high-level understanding of what it takes to implement a successful data warehouse project. A lot of the information is from my personal experience as a business intelligence professional, both as a client and as a vendor.

This site is divided into five main areas.

- Tools: The selection of business intelligence tools and the selection of the data warehousing team. Tools covered are:

* Database, Hardware
* ETL (Extraction, Transformation, and Loading)
* OLAP
* Reporting
* Metadata

- Steps: This selection contains the typical milestones for a data warehousing project, from requirement gathering to production rollout and beyond. I also offer my observations on the data warehousing field.

- Business Intelligence: Business intelligence is closely related to data warehousing. This section discusses business intelligence, as wellas the relationship between business intelligence and data warehousing.

- Concepts: This section discusses several concepts particular to the data warehousing field. Topics include:

* Dimensional Data Model
* Slowly Changing Dimension
* Conceptual, Logical, and Physical Data Model
* What is OLAP
* MOLAP, ROLAP, and HOLAP
* Bill Inmon vs. Ralph Kimball

- Business Intelligence Conferences: Lists upcoming conferences in the business intelligence / data warehousing industry.

- Glossary: A glossary of common data warehousing terms.

This site is updated frequently to reflect the latest technology, information, and reader feedback. Please bookmark this site now.

Are Web Analytics Different?

The topic of web analytics is one of the more discussed topics in the niche of data warehousing/decision support. Though there has been some intelligent writing on the topic, most of what is written seems to be the same unquestioning praise of supposedly revolutionary changes that analyzing this data is going to bring about.

This essay is not meant to be a how-to primer but rather to raise some questions in the mind of the reader. In this essay I would like to challenge some of the usual industry hyperbole.
Web analytics is the process of analyzing the record of what actions a user takes with his mouse and keyboard while visiting a site

That is all it is. It is not that mysterious. In fact, if data could be characterized as mundane, web data would have to rank among the most mundane.
Web data are just another source of data - with its own quirks and with limitations that come with all other sources of data

If you have worked with a variety of other data sources, you probably know much of what you need to know about working with web data. Yes, web data have quirks but what data (especially data as detailed as raw web data) do not have quirks.
The primary beneficiaries of web data analysis are web designers

Not many bet-your-company (and bet-your-career) decisions are going to be made with the results of web data analysis. Mostly it will be used for making many little decisions about how to modify the design of a web site . On the other hand, if your company is betting its continuance on smart use of its web site (and, except for the dot-coms, not many companies fall into that category), the cumulative effect of these little decisions may be company and career endangering.
The businesspeople will want and benefit most from highly aggregated web data that are usually combined with non-web data

Most web data has far more detail than the usual marketing or financial person wants to see. And these people think in terms of relative performance of "channels", most of which, for non dot-com companies, are not web based.
The person who is going to get the most insight from web data is the person who understands designing web sites so they are used profitably and who understands the power of data analysis

These people are hard to find! Sorry about the stereotypes but, at least in my limited exposure to good web designers and people who may not be hands-on designers but do have a good feel for the power of a web site, they are very different people from the financial and marketing analysts that data warehousing/decision support developers are used to working with. Most students of effective good web design do not strike me as people who want to sit down with a query/report tool or OLAP tool and refine some analysis for three hours.
Often web data analysis yields conclusions that would be immediately obvious to a good web designer

Web data analysis can serve as a very expensive substitute for a good web designer. On the other hand, though, sometimes web data analysis can be an inexpensive substitute for a very expensive web designer.
The value of detailed web data declines pretty fast over time

Though many data warehousing implementers won't admit it, most data loses value over time. (If you want to be a little more academic, the expected value of the data declines over time.) Because web sites change so much, the value of the web data declines quickly. Imagine doing a traditional cost center spending analysis. Now imagine what would happen if the cost centers and their reporting hierarchy would change everyday. This is kind of what it is like to analyze some web data.
In the same vein, the value of old detailed web data is dubious

I have read the publications predicting petabyte sized warehouses of months and even years of web data. What I have not read, though, is what people will do with older web data. Probably any web site that generates that much detailed data changes so often that, except at a very aggregated level, it is hard and perhaps meaningless to compare older data with newer data.
You can deliver "real-time" access to web data but your users will not be able to analyze it in real time

I read the pundits who say now you have got to go out and build usually expensive means to let users analyze web data generated up to the last millisecond. - I don't know who the pundits work with but most people I have encountered who analyze data are not polymaths who can, on an recurring hourly basis, disgorge meaningful analyses.
Web data is far "dirtier" than the usual data warehouse data

Web data often present problems with identifying web site users, identifying what was viewed, identifying the sequence of user activity on a web site, and identifying when the user started and stopped looking at a web site. Data may have gaps or data may be suspect. Many of these problems are not solvable given the design goals of a web site.
Web data relies on some pretty fuzzy categorization

All you may know about the web site user is (what you think are) the sequence of his clicks. To make this data sensible, you may have to categorize users by their clicking sequences. Also, you may have to categorize the pages on the web site. These categorizations can get pretty fuzzy. By that, I mean there may be many, many ways to categorize with no compelling reason to use one categorization method over another. Also, though it is not exactly categorization, you also have to define a "session" - when a user started and stopped accessing a web site. The definition of a session can be arbitrary.
If session data are culled from multiple servers, you probably have a unique problem

If the servers' clocks are not exactly (!!) in sync, you are going to have a hard time tracing user activity
If your site generates pages dynamically, you may have to write your own system to track the dynamic content

This information also has to be correlated with the log file analysis. If a page consists of multiple dynamically generated areas, then you have a more complicated problem.
Web data issues make it harder to do the manual judgment tasks needed to use data mining tools to separate useful information from gibberish

By now there is awareness that a great deal of judgment that can only be provided by a human being is needed to for most data mining work. As you can imagine, all the problems with web data make it harder to do these judgment tasks that no software can do.
Often cursory analysis of web data produces most of the value that can be gained from analyzing the data

Or, in more academic terms, the marginal value of additional analysis may drop pretty rapidly. The data may be so dirty and so fuzzy that analyzing it further may not be worth it.
Web data by itself do not give you much information about the web site user

Unless the web site user has bought something from the site, you know very little about the site user. (I read that most registration information, if given, is false.) And even if a site user has bought something, you need to combine the web data with data from internal and external (like and Equifax, etc) non-Web data to learn something about the web site user.
Web data do not give you that much information about why a person does not become a customer

When you read that web data is supposed to help you find why a person did not customer, you find you do this by analyzing the clicks of a customer who left the site without buying. Also, the last page a person clicked on is supposed to be important to analyze. - In actuality, you get a little information that is usually not great. Remember, usually the only thing you know about the non-customer is his clicking pattern. Analysis of clicking patterns, as mentioned before, can be quite moot.
Some marketing writers have questioned the effectiveness of the extremely targeted marketing some firms attempt via web analytics

Though I make no claim to be a marketing expert, some of the supposed experts whose publications I have read have question the effectiveness of finely segmenting markets (which at its most extreme is segmenting markets to one person). They say that at some point in segmenting a market it is actually possible to get negative marginal returns. I interpret their writings to mean that marketers have to be humble about their understanding of consumer behavior. Though it seems counterintuitive, much more can be effectively acted upon by observation of group behavior rather than by observation of individual behavior.



This essay is not meant to dissuade anyone from analyzing web data. Web data analysis can be extremely profitable. But like all other applications of data warehousing/decision support, web data analysis has to be done intelligently. That is, we have to know who are our real users, honestly acknowledge the data problems we cannot solve or can partially solve, and make our decisions on how much we want to analyze with an eye to expected marginal benefits versus marginal expected costs.