I had the privilege to present two sessions at SQL Saturday #131 in Phoenix. It was my first time presenting, and although a little nervous I think it went really well.
Besides that, the organizers did an exceptional job and everyone had a great time. I definitely hope to be there again next year. Thanks to everyone who came out and made it great!!!
Here are the slide decks from my two presentations:
Hi Martin,
I was in your session of SQLSaturday#158. It is great session!
I hope you can help me with the following two questions:
1) The Temporal Fact Table”, by “Temporal”, do you mean the facts about prices only are kept for a certain time period, after that time pertiod you discard the rows?
2) You have mentioned that you have a Price model and use the model you gives price recommendation. How do you create your model?
By using the term temporal, we are referring to the way in which the fact records relate to time. In this case by means of a date range instead of a single point-in-time reference. We did not discard any fact records…in some cases you may want to, but having the history of how retail prices, cost and coupons change over time is invaluable and creates the ideal opportunity for trend reports.
For our price modeling tool, we had to create a custom front-end application which the business could use to build their models (what-if scenarios). We did this with ASP.NET and all the back-end stuff was in the same SQL Server database as the dimensional model. This means that we had an interesting combination of transactional and dimensional objects in the same database. Recommendations were presented to the end-users through a series of SSRS reports.
Thank you for the feedback, and also for attending my session at SQL Saturday #158.