Simple Stars

Business Scenario
LotaDoors is a timber merchant who sells many types of pre-formed timber products such
as doors, windows and roof trusses. When a sale is made from one of their branches a
transaction is created in the EPOS (Electronic Point-of-Sale) system and the stock
automatically reduced in the stock control system.
LotaDoors have heard about Data Warehousing and would like to explore this to help
them better target their customer-base who are all account holding customers. In practice
what they would like is to establish the top hundred best selling products each month and
see how these vary throughout the year and across the predetermined customer groups.
The products are already classified into groups according to their type, for instance timber,
building materials, hardware etc.

Business Questions
In brief the questions they want answers to are:
1. What was the total value of sales per branch and product in each month of 2002?
2. What were the 10 best selling products by quantity in October 2002?
3. Which month brought in the most sales in 2002?
4. Which branch produced the most sales in January 2002?
5. Which customers brought in more than £5,000 of revenue in August 2002?
6. Give a month by month comparison of sales value per branch and product group
for the year 2002.

Tasks
Use the information provided above to create and design the following simple stars. You
should use the methodology sheets provided, one for each of the tasks below:
1. Download the LotaDoors database from Blackboard and inspect the data
2. Design a star schema that can be used to answer the first four business questions
above;

1 of 5
3. Design a star schema that can be used to better answer business question 2;
Result from star schema create in Task 2

2 of 5
 Result from star schema create in Task 3

4. Design a star schema that can be used to answer business question 5.

3 of 5
Result from star schema create for Question 1

4 of 5
Result from star schema create for Question 3

Result from star schema create for Question 4

5 of 5