Dimension Design Decision

Hi

While designing the resource dimension for our data warehouse I am little confused about the following options:

1. Which attributes he resource dimension should contain i.e. only the attributes which describe the person like name, address, status, gender etc or also the employment related attributes like dateInService, dateOutOfService, ContractLocation, CostCenter, JobLevel and JobTitle etc. ( My tilt is towards the first option to include only person related attributes in resource dimension, whats your suggestion?)

2. The age and age group are decided using the date of birth of an employee. Shall I make them computed attributes so they will be filled automatically while inserting the data or I should calculate and fill them manually from ETL package?

Waiting for your suggestions.

Cheers
Harris

The key to attributing a model is defining the things within the model. If you have a clear and unambiguous definition for resource then adding the appropriate attributes should be easier. That said, I agree with your first inclination. The second set of attributes sound like fact attributes as they appear to be dependent on an event. Age, if required, should be calculated in the view or BI tool.

Hey

Thanks for your reply and suggestions. I am now thinking to include dateInService and DateOutofService attributes to resource dimension because there is a requirement to get the years of service of an employee in case of an incident and I need these columns to calculate the years of service. For all the other like job title, job level and costcenter etc i will keep them separate. Any comments on this?

Cheers
Harris