Ad Hoc Classification Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

AN EXAMPLE OF AD HOC CLASSIFICATION

Here, we see that the elastic nature of the demand for Peak Coffee makes it an ideal candidate for a marketing price reduction. Now, the question from the developers corner is: How will our data warehouse gather the necessary data to plot these demand curves? Because this type of analysis is required by the marketing department, we must be able to plan for the ability to plot the demand curves for each brand name within a specific product or product line.

If we examine the data required for this function, we’ll find that the data warehouse will need to track the total dollar amount spent for each and every brand name that Guttbaum’s sells, and group the total sales figures according to the prices of the products at the time each product is sold. In addition, we also need to group these averages by product line. Operationally, this type of data function is implemented by keeping arrays of accumulators for each price/sales grouping. The array is three dimensional, and each slice of the cube would be for a specific product. For example, a slice for Bob’s Bleach might appear as shown in Table 3.2.

Price ($)                                  Sales
2.00                                  $167,000
2.10                                  $150,000
2.20                                  $145,000
2.30                                  $130,000

Table 3.2 A slice of a data array showing statistics for Bob’s Bleach.

The data aggregations shown in Table 3.2 will need to be included in the data analysis of summarized and aggregated data for the data warehouse. As you can see from this example, the aggregations required for data analysis are not always obvious.

This is an excerpt from "High Performance Data Warehousing".

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