Cubes and Dimensions

Hi,

I’ve been tasked with building a warehouse - fact tables/Dimensions/star schemas. So far I have modelled 4 stars and around 13 Dimensions. One of the dimensions contains a number of demographic attributes i.e. age-band,gender,religion,ethnicity,marital-status,ex-offender and sexual-orientation - 7 attributes in total. Having built the warehouse we will want to publish a one or more cubes from the underlying star-schemas. A colleague has suggested that in order to build the cubes the attributes in the Demographic dimension need to be broken out into their own separate dimension tables i.e. we would go from having 13 Dimensions to over 50 (there are other dimensions similar to the Demographics dimension). My question is - Is my colleague correct in his assertion that I should have separate dimensions for essentially every attribute ?

I’m afraid I have no experience of building cubes so am in a poor position to argue with him.

Any guidance around this would be much appreciated.

Regards

Philip