Designing and building dimensions and facts
Because our focus is on building a multidimensional model in SSAS, the next few sections will be relatively short, but focused on what you need in order to build out a good star schema using SQL Server 2019.
Column names – business-friendly or designer-friendly?
Without trying to start a war about whether you should have spaces in your column names, I want to call out that this is merely an option. In SQL Server, you can use truly business-friendly names in your tables and columns. Most, if not all, DBAs will argue that this is not a best practice. In order to properly do this, the database object names must be enclosed in brackets. While the name might appear in a nice format on the resulting report, the SQL syntax becomes more complex.
The reserved word conundrum
In every RDBMS system, reserved words exist. This commonly includes words such as NAME, EXTERNAL, GROUP, BULK, and USER. SQL Server has well over 100 of these...
