Master the most agile and resilient design for building analytics applications: the Unified Star Schema (USS) approach. The USS has many benefits over traditional dimensional modeling. Witness the power of the USS as a single star schema that serves as a foundation for all present and future business requirements of your organization.

Data warehouse legend Bill Inmon and business intelligence innovator, Francesco Puppini, explain step-by-step why the Unified Star Schema is the recommended approach for business intelligence designs today, and show through many examples how to build and use this new solution.

This book contains two parts. Part I, Architecture, explains the benefits of data marts and data warehouses, covering how organizations progressed to their current state of analytics, and to the challenges that result from current business intelligence architectures. Chapter 1 covers the drivers behind and the characteristics of the data warehouse and data mart. Chapter 2 introduces dimensional modeling concepts, including fact tables, dimensions, star joins, and snowflakes. Chapter 3 recalls the evolution of the data mart. Chapter 4 explains Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), and the value ETL brings to reporting. Chapter 5 explores the Integrated Data Mart Approach, and Chapter 6 explains how to monitor this environment. Chapter 7 describes the different types of metadata within the data warehouse environment. Chapter 8 progresses through the evolution to our current modern data warehouse environment.

Part II, the Unified Star Schema, covers the Unified Star Schema (USS) approach and how it solves the challenges introduced in Part I. There are eight chapters within Part II:

• Chapter 9, Introduction to the Unified Star Schema: Learn about its architecture and use cases, as well as how the USS approach differs from the traditional approach.