Data Warehousing
A data warehouse is the structural foundation of most OLAP and BI solutions. Data warehouses, in most cases, are less normalized than the OLTP databases that act as its sources. A typical data warehouse contains two types of tables: facts and dimensions. Fact tables contain the measurable values, such as sales, number of sales, and count of items, to mention a few. The values are often referred to as measures; dimensions categorize or group those measurable values. As SQL Server has evolved, so has its capability to build OLAP solutions on database structures that are not data warehouses. However, using a data warehouse as the data source has several benefits and offers the developer a seamless process for design and data refresh.
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