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jgaull
Starting Member
1 Post |
 Posted - 2008-03-12 : 09:46:13
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| Hi all,I'm working on my first data warehouse and I'm not sure how I should name the columns in the database. The first phase of the data warehouse is to store a bunch of data from one third party source. The source contains over 100 pieces of data and the business user doesn't even know what some of the fields are but he wants to store everything. The third party refers to the each field with a somewhat cryptic short name and a longer description. The short name isn't always cryptic.My question is am I better off naming my columns the same as the source system's short name so that I can easily debug problems later? Should I instead try to shorten their definition into something meaningful? On a side note, I'm 100% positive that we'll never populate the tables in questions with data from an additional source.Thanks! |
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Page47
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
2878 Posts |
Posted - 2008-03-12 : 12:19:01
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| If you are going to build AS OLAP cubes on top, I would go ahead and come up with meaningful names. It'll make the cube dev process much easier....Jayto here knows when |
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JasonL
Starting Member
35 Posts |
Posted - 2008-03-12 : 16:41:54
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| While you are at it, may want to create a view on top so that you have a map of the MEANINGFUL column with the source column for future reference. It will come in very handy later on.JasonL |
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blindman
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
2365 Posts |
Posted - 2008-03-12 : 20:22:13
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Your datawarehouse schema and naming conventions should in no way be tied to any of your production databases. You should plan for your DW to pull data from many systems, and hopefully outlast most of them. So design it independently.quote:
Originally posted by jgaullThe source contains over 100 pieces of data and the business user doesn't even know what some of the fields are but he wants to store everything.
You are not building a datawarehouse. You are building a data garbage dump.e4 d5 xd5 Nf6 |
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Column Names in Data Warehouse