Monash University

School of Information Systems and Management

IMS 5024 IS Modelling
Tutorial 12 – Data Warehouse Design

Purpose:
This tutorial will give you an opportunity to practice your multi-dimensional modelling
skills. For each exercise, draw a star-schema based multi-dimensional model. This will
give you an idea of the implications of your design decisions on the final size (and
therefore performance) of the data warehouse.
Example:
Below is the simple star schema:
The schema describes a typical sales scenario – we have dollar and unit sales values, for
each day, store, product and customer. Each row in the fact table, therefore, corresponds
to the total sales for the day that were made to a particular customer at a particular store
for each product.

Exercise 1:
Design a star schema according to the following scenario.
The Restaurants ‘R Us wholesale restaurant company supplies equipment to 55 different
restaurants in Melbourne, such as tables, chairs, table cloths, napkin holders, cutlery and
so on, as well as kitchen equipment such as saucepans, knives and chef clothing. They
wish to analyze their daily sales in terms of revenue, unit sales, costs and profit for each
product and customer. They also would like to know this information by product line and
product group (front of house, kitchen).

Exercise 2:
For the following scenario, design a set of star schemas to handle the heterogeneous
product dimension.
An insurance company offers household and automobile insurance. They would like to
analyse claims by customer and policy type. Common to both types of policy is a policy
number, an insured amount and a premium amount paid by the customer. Household
insurance policies, however, record address details of the property, numbers of rooms,
security system and householders. Automobile insurance policies record Vehicle
dentification Numbers (VINs), number plate, primary driver, vehicle make and model.
Assume three years of claim data, 150,000 customers with an average of one claim per
customer over the three years.