Entity Relationship diagrams and normalization techniques
are popularly used for database design in OLTP
environments. However, the database designs recommended
by ER diagrams are inappropriate for decision support
systems where efficiency in querying and in loading data
(including incremental loads) are important.
Most data warehouses use a star schema to represent the
multidimensional data model. The database consists of a
single fact table and a single table for each dimension. Each
tuple in the fact table consists of a pointer (foreign key - often
uses a generated key for efficiency) to each of the dimensions
that provide its multidimensional coordinates, and stores the
numeric measures for those coordinates. Each dimension
table consists of columns that correspond to attributes of the
dimension. Figure 3 shows an example of a star schema.