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What is Dimensional Modeling?

Last updated Sep 23, 2022 - Edit Source

Dimensional modeling (DM) is part of the Business Dimensional Lifecycle methodology developed by Ralph Kimball, which includes a set of methods, techniques, and concepts for use in Data Warehouse design.

As a bottom-up approach, the approach focuses on identifying the critical business processes within a business and modeling and implementing these before adding additional business processes.  An alternative approach from Bill Inmon advocates a top-down design of the model of all the enterprise data using tools such as Entity-Relationship Modeling (ER).

Read more on Data Modeling with SQL and dbt.