One of my favorite tools to use when designing a data warehouse is the Dimensional Modeling Spreadsheet created by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite of the Kimball Group in conjunction with their must-have book, The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit. Not only does it allow you to fully build out your fact/dimension design, ETL logic, source-to-target mapping and more, it also generates a script that will create the first iteration of your data model once you have everything in place. I always try to fully flesh out this spreadsheet before I create the first SQL table, it really helps get things off to a good start. As an added bonus, Joy and Warren have a whole site full of useful tools and utilities for building a Data Warehouse.
Mark Garner has just released Beta 1 of a tool called Metashare. He appears to have based it on the Kimball Group spreadsheet I mentioned above, and pulls the same data back out of your data model for the purposes of documentation. I will look forward to checking out Metashare with the next DW that I build.
2 comments:
I'm excited to hear you might be interested in MetaShare. Let me know your thoughts.
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