Event-Feeded Dimension Solution

From the point of view of a data warehouse system its part of collecting and receiving information from other systems is crucial for all subsequent business intelligence applications. The incoming information can be classified generally in two types, the state-snapshot data and the state-change or event data usually called transactional data, which contains information about the change processes applied on the instances of information objects. On the way towards active data warehouses it becomes more important to provide complete data with minimal latency. We focus in this paper on dimensional data provided by any data-master application. The information transfer is done via messages containing the change-information of the dimension instances. The receiving data warehouse system is able to validate the event-messages, reconstruct the complete history of the dimension and provide a well applicable "comprehensive slowly changing dimension" (cSCD) interface for well-performing queries on the historical and current state of the dimension. A prototype implementation of "active integration" of a data warehouse is proposed.