Dimension Design Question

I need help understanding how the dimensions should be designed and why?
Here is my scenario -
We have two different business entities
Customer -- Someone whom we have already serviced or currently servicing
Account -- Someone whom we might have serviced, currently servicing, or not serviced at all

Not every account becomes a customer and not every customer has to be in account . 99.9% sure it is one-to-one relationship (currently, working to verify 0.1% case)

Both combined are less than 2M records.

For sake of argument at us assume –
Customer and Account have same attributes.
• Should Customer and Account be modeled as different dimension?
• Should Customer and Account be 1 dimension with ‘Type’ column identity each row ?

Customer and Account have few different attributes.
• Should Customer and Account be modeled as different dimension?
• Should Customer and Account be 1 dimension with ‘Type’ column identity each row and on Account row, the customer specific attributes can be set as ‘NULL’ or ‘NA’ and vice versa?


Opinion? Suggestion? Advice?

Hi eesha,

Can you describe your transactions? How are the two business entities used in the business?

Thanks,
Alisher
www.streebo.com

In my past experiences, we had prospects and customers in the same dimension with a status that differentiated the two. I would assume that your source system converts the Account record to a Customer record. This would probably be a type 2 dimension so you can track if/when the account converts.