The Northwind data model

Now that we downloaded the Northwind Microsoft Access database and successfully created our ODBC connection, let's have a look on the Northwind data model. We can see two main contexts in the Northwind database, as shown in the following screenshot:

The first context is related to orders, and the other one is related to inventory. We can think of context as a subject area that covers some related information stored in some related tables. Before we go deep into the Northwind data model, let's first define some terminologies that we will use.

Dimensional modeling terminologies

We have three types of information from the business point of view:

• Dimension: This is an angle or point of view from which we can look at our data. Region or product is a good example. You might need to check your sales by region or by product.

• Measure: This is a number that represents a metric such as sales or number of purchase orders. An aggregation method should be assigned to each measure...