How to model a contract

Hi,

I want to star model a contract between an employer and a employee. The contract has a begin and a enddate. I was thinking about to model this as fact. I am also looking into the HRM solutions of Kimball books. This is another kind of fact than a transaction fact with a timestamp of happening. Currently not quite convinced of this solution. Hope that someone could give some clues.

Gr,
Hennie

Hi Hennie

You might want to consider a periodic-snapshot fact. If an employee has a contract for 6 months, you'd load 6 records into the fact (one for each month) if you are looking at data month-to-month.

FACT:

Period_______EmployeeKey_______ContractKey________SomeMeasure
201201______1_________________1_________________x
201202______1_________________1_________________x
201203______1_________________1_________________x
201204______1_________________1_________________x
201205______1_________________1_________________x
201206______1_________________1_________________x

Perhaps provide more context around what you're trying to model, including what you're measuring.

thnx for your reply. Currently looking in the books of kimball and there is also the same solution suggested as you do. The problem is that I do not have a business question. Currently working at a group of analysts and they want to analyze the data. There are some basic questions. So I wanted to start small and take some cyclic steps to improve the data (alla prototyping).

Ken Collier has written a good book titled Agile Analytics that's specific to business intelligence. The agile approach to analysis that he promotes may be of use to you.

http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Analytics-Value-Driven-Intelligence-Warehousing/dp/032150481X