Summary

This brings us to the end of this chapter on data modeling best practices. If you haven't finished all of the exercises, don't worry, all of the solutions are included in the solution files.

To recap, in this chapter we learned how to deal with common consistency issues, such as facts without associated dimensions, and vice versa, how we can reduce storage requirements by using numeric keys, removing unused fields from our model, and by splitting high-cardinality fields.

We also learned how to approach two of the most common design challenges, concatenating two fact tables and creating link tables, and what the advantages of the different methods are.

Finally, we learned how to create a master calendar.

In the next chapter, we will learn some basic data transformation techniques that will help us cleanse source data and load data that isn't in a straightforward, tabular format.