Guides to Beginners and a DimDate question

Hello,

I am new to Dimensional modeling, i v been used to E/R modeling and trying to make the mental shift to this kind of DW modeling, is there any guides for beginners or practices I can do to start in Star schema modeling.

And another question, I always read Dim_Date, are the dates in Dim_Date loaded from the table from the source or this table just contains all the dates of the year, what i mean for example:
if we have in the source system, A product table, customer table, order table (With order date or date of the fact) and order line table. and we want to load it into a star schema model where there is s Dim_Date with a FK_Date into the fact table,
How is this loaded from the ETL, do we load the date in the order table and create a row in Dim_Date with all the attributes (Year, Month, Quarter) and then insert the corresponding FK into the fact table ? I mean parallel loaded Dim Date and fact table?

Thanks in Advance

Charbel

Buy this book, http://www.kimballgroup.com/data-warehouse-business-intelligence-resources/books/data-warehouse-dw-toolkit/

Date dimension is pre-loaded. No adds should occur during the ETL process.

BoxesAndLines wrote:Buy this book, http://www.kimballgroup.com/data-warehouse-business-intelligence-resources/books/data-warehouse-dw-toolkit/

Date dimension is pre-loaded.  No adds should occur during the ETL process.  

Thanks a lot for the link, so the date dimension is preloaded, then when we load the fact table, to be able to insert the Date FK, we should lookup which key it belongs in the Dim-Date to be able to insert the Date FK in the order facts ? am I right ?

Thanks

You got it.