A Lawrence Corr course

Agile Dimensional Modeling.

Three days on the latest agile patterns for gathering Business Intelligence requirements and designing Data Warehouse and BI systems that hold up. Presented live online by data warehousing author Lawrence Corr.

Built on BEAM✲, Business Event Analysis and Modeling.

Get more information three days, live online, whiteboard to star schema

The Context

Visual BI requirements gathering and collaborative dimensional modeling

Agile techniques emphasise the early and frequent delivery of working software, stakeholder collaboration, responsiveness to change and waste elimination. They have revolutionised application development and are increasingly being adopted by DW/BI teams.

This course provides practical tools and techniques for applying agility to the design of DW/BI database schemas, the earliest needed and most important working software for BI.

The course contrasts agile and non-agile DW/BI development and highlights the inherent failings of traditional BI requirements analysis and data modeling.

modelstorming = modeling + brainstorming

Through classroom sessions and team exercises you will discover how modelstorming data requirements directly with your BI stakeholders overcomes those limitations.

Designed for people in the data domain

Who this course is for

Three groups get the most out of the three days.

  • Business and IT professionals

    Anyone who wants to develop better BI solutions faster, and wants the whole team pulling in the same direction while they do it.

  • People new to DW/BI

    Business analysts, scrum masters, data modelers and architects, DBAs and application developers new to DW/BI will benefit from the solid grounding in dimensional modeling the course provides.

  • Experienced DW/BI practitioners

    The course updates your hard-earned industry knowledge with the latest ideas on agile modeling, data warehouse design patterns and business model innovation.

Learn proven patterns to common problems

What you will learn

Four things you walk away able to do, not four things you have heard about.

  • 01

    Model BI requirements with your BI stakeholders, using inclusive tools and visual thinking techniques.

  • 02

    Rapidly translate BI requirements into efficient, flexible data warehouse designs.

  • 03

    Identify and solve common BI problems before they occur, using dimensional design patterns.

  • 04

    Plan, design and incrementally develop BI solutions with agility.

Get more information hands on the model, not slides about the model

Facilitated by

Lawrence Corr, data modelstormer and trainer

Lawrence Corr

Data modelstormer and trainer, author of Agile Data Warehouse Design

LinkedIn

Lawrence is a DW/BI designer and modelstormer who has worked in management information, decision support and business intelligence for more than 25 years, and has specialised in data warehouse design since 1996.

He has developed, reviewed and enhanced BI solutions in aerospace, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, engineering, manufacturing, television, financial services, e-commerce and retail, for clients in Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Africa.

Lawrence held the position of data warehouse practice leader at Linc Systems Corporation in Connecticut and vice-president of data warehousing products at Teleran Technologies in New Jersey. In 2000 he was invited by Ralph Kimball to become an associate and teach data warehousing classes for Kimball University in Europe and South Africa.

These days he works completely independently through DecisionOne Consulting, based in the UK, providing agile data consultancy and training worldwide.

taught dimensional design to thousands of students

Learn then do

Course syllabus

Three days, each one building on the last. Requirements on day one, star schemas on day two, the hard patterns on day three.

Time commitment. The course runs across three days, live online.

  • Modelstorming, agile BI requirements gathering

    Agile dimensional modeling fundamentals

    • BI and DW design requirements, challenges and opportunities, the need for agility
    • Modeling with BI stakeholders, the case for collaborative data modeling
    • Modeling for measurement, the case for dimensional modeling, star schemas, facts and dimensions
    • Thinking dimensionally using the 7Ws (who, what, when, where, how many, why and how)
    • Business Event Analysis and Modeling (BEAM✲), an agile approach to dimensional modeling

    Dimensional modelstorming tools

    • Data stories, themes and BEAM✲ tables, modeling BI data requirements by example
    • Timelines, modeling time and process measurement
    • Hierarchy charts, modeling dimensional drill-downs and rollups
    • Change stories, capturing historical reporting requirements and slowly changing dimension rules
    • Storyboarding the data warehouse design, matrix planning and estimating for agile BI development
    • The Business Model Canvas, aligning DW/BI design with business model definition and innovation
    • The BI Model Canvas, a systematic approach to BI and star schema design

  • Agile star schema design

    Star schema design

    • Test-driven design, agile and lean data profiling for validating and improving requirements models
    • Data warehouse reuse, identifying, defining and developing conformed dimensions and facts
    • Balancing just enough design up front (JEDUF) and just in time (JIT) data modeling
    • Designing flexible, high performance star schemas, maximising the benefits of surrogate keys
    • Refactoring star schemas, responding to change, dealing with data debt
    • Lean minimum viable DW documentation, enhanced star schemas and the DW matrix

    How much and how many, designing facts, measures and KPIs

    • Fact types, transactions, periodic snapshots, accumulating snapshots
    • Fact additivity, additive, semi-additive and non-additive measures
    • Fact performance and usability, indexing, partitioning, aggregating and consolidating facts

  • Dimensional design patterns

    Who and what patterns, customers, employees, products and services

    • Large populations with rapidly changing dimensional attributes, mini-dimensions and customer facts
    • Customer segmentation, business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) dimensions
    • Recursive customer relationships and organisation structures, variable-depth hierarchy maps
    • Current and historical reporting perspectives, hybrid slowly changing dimensions
    • Mixed business models, heterogeneous products and services, diverse attribution, ragged hierarchies
    • Product and service decomposition, bill of materials and product unbundling analysis

    When and where patterns, dates, times and locations

    • Flexible date handling, ad-hoc date ranges and year-to-date analysis
    • Modeling time as dimensions and facts
    • Multinational BI, national language reporting, multiple currencies, time zones and national calendars
    • Understanding journeys and trajectories, modeling events with multiple geographies

    Why and how patterns, cause and effect

    • Causal factors, triggering events, referrals, promotions, weather and exception reason dimensions
    • Fact specific dimensions, transaction and event status descriptions
    • Multi-valued dimensions, bridge tables, weighting factors, impact and correctly weighted analysis
    • Behaviour tagging, modeling causation and outcome, dimensional overloading, step dimensions
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What you take away

Course material

You keep everything you need to run modelstorming sessions back at your own whiteboard.

  • A course workbook covering every pattern taught across the three days
  • The BEAM✲ agile dimensional modeling reference card
  • A copy of Agile Data Warehouse Design by Lawrence Corr and Jim Stagnitto
Agile Data Warehouse Design, book cover

Agile Data Warehouse Design

A step-by-step guide to capturing DW/BI requirements and turning them into high performance dimensional models the most direct way there is, by modelstorming with your BI stakeholders.

The book describes BEAM✲, an agile approach to dimensional modeling that improves communication between data warehouse designers, BI stakeholders and the whole development team. The tools and techniques move designers away from their keyboards and entity relationship tools, and get them modeling interactively with their colleagues. Everyone thinks dimensionally from the outset. Developers understand how to implement the solution efficiently. Business stakeholders feel ownership of the data warehouse they have just created, and can already picture how they will use it to answer their business questions.

Buy the book on Amazon
the reference card is the bit people pin above their desk

Register your interest

Get more information

Tell us about your team and what you are trying to build. Shane will be in touch with dates and details.

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public dates, or run it privately for your team

Three days, one skill set

Ready to modelstorm with your stakeholders?

Tell us about your team and Lawrence will contact you to discuss the dates.

Get more information See the other courses whiteboard to star schema