Data Warehouse Designs : Achieving ROI with Market Basket Analysis and Time Variance

This book presents two data warehouse solutions that deliver significant ROI; market basket analysis, approached as a database design issue rather than a data model issue; and time variance or temporal data, which present past events in their historical context. The former is available to any enterprise with a data warehouse, while the latter provides a simple design that accommodates large data volumes. The text combines these two database designs into one design, which performs market basket analysis of transactions in their historical context.

Market Basket Analysis (MBA) provides the ability to continually monitor the affinities of a business and can help an organization achieve a key competitive advantage. Time Variant data enables data warehouses to directly associate events in the past with the participants in each individual event. In the past however, the use of these powerful tools in tandem led to performance degradation and resulted in unactionable and even damaging information.

Data Warehouse Designs: Achieving ROI with Market Basket Analysis and Time Variance presents an innovative, soup-to-nuts approach that successfully combines what was previously incompatible, without degradation, and uses the relational architecture already in place. Built around two main chapters, Market Basket Solution Definition and Time Variant Solution Definition, it provides a tangible how-to design that can be used to facilitate MBA within the context of a data warehouse.

• Presents a solution for creating home-grown MBA data marts
• Includes database design solutions in the context of Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and Teradata relational database management systems (RDBMS)
• Explains how to extract, transform, and load data used in MBA and Time Variant solutions

The book uses standard RDBMS platforms, proven database structures, standard SQL and hardware, and software and practices already accepted and used in the data warehousing community to fill the gaps left by most conceptual discussions of MBA. It employs a form and language intended for a data warehousing audience to explain the practicality of how data is delivered, stored, and viewed. Offering a comprehensive explanation of the applications that provide, store, and use MBA data, Data Warehouse Designs provides you with the language and concepts needed to require and receive information that is relevant and actionable.