Prerequisites
The example we will be using stems from a Star schema design for a data warehouse. It is expected that you are already familiar with terms such as Star, Snowflake, Fact, and Dimension, and that you have an understanding of data warehouse schemas. The vast majority of development projects out there will use such a design as the basis for their BI projects. If you are not familiar with this, we would recommend studying one of the seminal texts on this subject beforehand - The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Ralph Kimball.