Creating dimensions in OWB

The Warehouse Builder provides a couple of ways to create a dimension. One way is to use the wizards that it provides, which will automatically create a dimension for us. The other way is to manually create it. We have identified three dimensions that we are going to need—a Date dimension, a Product dimension, and a Store dimension. The Date dimension, as we've seen, is our time/date dimension for providing a time series for our data. That kind of dimension is common to most data warehouses and the information it contains is very similar from warehouse to warehouse. So, recognizing this commonality, the Warehouse Builder provides us a special wizard to use just for time dimensions. Let's begin with that one.

Note

Let's talk a bit about "creating". Throughout this chapter we'll discuss creating objects, but what we're really creating is the metadata that describes the objects. Nothing will be actually created in the database yet. We won't actually do that until Chapter...